Republican Demands Obama Email Accountability?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Democrats, Republicans, Technology
This is rich…
After dismissing calls for the Bush email system to be more accountable, Rep. Darrell Issa of California is demanding that the Obama administration report back to him in two weeks about how they plan on archiving and saving emails they had to send via Gmail because the Bush system kept breaking down.
A California Republican congressman has called on President Obama to put in place a system that ensures all White House emails be preserved even if official business was done through private e- mail accounts.Rep. Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, made the request in a February 19 letter to White House Counsel Greg Craig.
Issa specifically mentioned the new administration’s brief use of Gmail accounts after Obama was sworn in last month, as they waited for the official White House e-mail accounts to become active.
“As you know, any e-mail sent or received by White House officials may be subject to retention under the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” Issa wrote Craig in the letter.
“The use of personal e-mail accounts, such as Gmail to conduct official business raises the prospect that presidential records will not be captured by the White House e-mail archiving system. Consequently Gmail users on the President’s staff run the risk of incorrectly classifying their e-mails as non-records under the [Presidential Records] Act.”
Now, let’s remember that the Clinton administration actually had a way to archive in place, but the Bush team dismantled it and replaced it with, well, nothing. So for Issa to demand this now is extremely hacky.
On a semi-related note, who wants to bet that Issa doesn’t approve of Senator Leahy’s truth commission?
This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 and is filed under Barack, Democrats, Republicans, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 20th, 2009 at 8:16 am
OK, so this guy is an inconsistent douche. I’ll stipulate that. But who cares? He was either right then, or he’s right now. Which is it, do you think?
I’m inclined to believe that one way or another sooner or later a system ought to be in place to archive all this stuff. In other words, he was wrong then, but he’s probably right now. Right?
February 20th, 2009 at 8:43 am
KK,
Inconsistent douche or ideological douche? The first implies the ability to weigh information and change position based on findings. The second – not so much. I agree he’s right now, but he appears to choose his rightness to coincide with his ideology.
February 20th, 2009 at 11:36 am
As an episode like this so richly illustrates, ideological partisanship applies one type of consistency while creating inconsistency along another axis. Standards for administration behavior are right at the top of the list of things where the parties exchange their views alongside the exchange of the oval office.
So actions like Issa’s are so common that they are barely worth noticing. Since I’m not a partisan for either party, I can afford to care about the issue.
My point really is that I am happy to cheerfully acknowledge the clowny shamelessness of Issa on this point, but that it really isn’t what folks at a place called Donklephant should get caught up in. I’m more interested in establishing a sensible communications archiving policy for ALL admins to follow.
That Issa has taken a stand 180 degrees opposite his precious one actually presents people who care about the issue with an opportunity to establish a sensible policy, right? Isn’t that a more satisfying outcome than settling for “here’s another example of a republican who is an ideological partisan douche?”
Surely you know as well as I that for every Issa there’s a democrat who lost interest in this issue on 11/05/08.
February 20th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Well said Kranky Kritter
February 20th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
agreed
February 21st, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Nobody knows how to manage and preserve this records stuff. All Admins have failed miserably at this. What this country needs (and esp the White House) is a White House mandated National Records Manager. Then you will get some decent transparency/accountability.
February 21st, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Amen Kranky
February 22nd, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Kranky, respectfully, if I wrote multiple posts about this then you may have a point about me getting “caught up.” But I didn’t and I’m not. The end.
John, that’s actually a great idea, but I know Obama said he’d create a position for a national “Chief Technical Officer” so I think that person may be able to either fill that role or create some common sense framework to keep 21st century records.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:29 am
CTO actuually has been punted to OMB e-Gov head – Vivek Kundra. People confuse Records Management with throwing Technology at the problem under a CTO. If it is not thought out properly in terms of records, technology actually makes records management worse. That is what happened to Clinton and the White House in the last 10 years. They had all the latest and greatest in Technology Apps and gurus to implement but they failed to fully assess their records and empower a records manager in the information life-cycle planning to make sure records were properly captured and managed per the law. Making the CTO the Records Manager would just continue this charade. The Records Manager needs to be at the table and embedded in the front end of the Content Management process to make this thing work. This is true at the White House as it is in all Government Agencies and all business/orgs actually. Very Very few actually do it well or half way competently. The White House gets the press but open up the paper folks – it’s widespread and worse all over.