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Bill USA

(6,436 posts)
Tue Sep 20, 2016, 08:30 PM Sep 2016

The George W. Bush White House ‘Lost’ 22 Million Emails - while the media yawned

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/george-w-bush-white-house-lost-22-million-emails-497373.html


For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.
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The George W. Bush White House ‘Lost’ 22 Million Emails - while the media yawned (Original Post) Bill USA Sep 2016 OP
If he had to run again in 2008, it would have been an issue for sure. yeoman6987 Sep 2016 #1
I like to point out to people how 'interesting" it is that Repugnants have become so interested in Bill USA Sep 2016 #3
For secret society members... czarjak Sep 2016 #2
 

yeoman6987

(14,449 posts)
1. If he had to run again in 2008, it would have been an issue for sure.
Tue Sep 20, 2016, 08:40 PM
Sep 2016

Timing was good for Georgie on this issue.

Bill USA

(6,436 posts)
3. I like to point out to people how 'interesting" it is that Repugnants have become so interested in
Wed Sep 21, 2016, 07:47 PM
Sep 2016

use of official email facilities and record keeping, when a few years ago they couldn't be LESS interested. those millions of emails would never have been "found" if those two organizations hadn't sued the Executive Office of the Presidency.

I also like to point out this gives context to Hillary's email "scandal", in particular, how extraordinary and out of the ordinary it is.

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