"The Whitehouse Dog Ate My eMail"

From the 5/7/2008 Washington Post:

White House tells court of missing emails from beginning of Iraq war
The White House has admitted in court that it has lost three months of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq war, raising questions about the possible deletion of politically sensitive records.

The disclosure came in a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that specialises in uncovering classified documents.

The archive was told it could not receive emails relating to Iraq, despite a 30-year-old law requiring the preservation of presidential records, because a system upgrade had deleted up to 5m emails.

George Bush's administration faced a deadline of this week to outline the contents of 438 backup tapes that were believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the US invaded Iraq—and September.

In a court filing yesterday, however, White House chief information officer Theresa Payne said "the earliest date" with email on any of the tapes was May 23 2003: the date the UN gave formal approval to the US occupation of Iraq.  Read the full post