The George W. Bush White House electronic archive system failed to capture 83 percent of emails on 21 days between September 2003 and August 2005, according two Washington, D.C. watchdog groups.

As part of a settlement against a federal lawsuit brought in 2007 by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive over email retention, the White House agreed to compare raw data on backup tapes against emails captured in the archive system for 21 days identified as having unusually low volumes of email traffic.

The comparison revealed that 83 percent of emails found on the backup tapes for those 21 days were not part of the archived collection of Bush era emails, the watchdogs said in a May 17 statement. Moreover, those 21 days are likely not the only low volume days in which the archive system failed to capture messages, the watchdogs say.

Because the Bush White House "used a patently flawed process to identify low volume days, a large volume of unrestored emails on backup tapes still remains missing," they state.

In a letter to the National Archives and Records Administration, the two watchdogs urge NARA to use the backup tapes to find other uncaptured emails.

"We believe there remains a large volume of unrestored emails on backup tapes that, absent further action, will be lost forever to history," they warn.

In a separate letter to White House officials, the watchdogs also asked for the formation of a record keeping commission. They cite a NARA analysis of self-reported agency record retention practices that found that 79 percent of agencies are at high or moderate risk of improper destruction of records.

"The need for immediate action could not be greater. With each passing day, we lose another slice of our history," the groups wrote.

For more:
- see the CREW and National Security Archive press release
- their letter to NARA about Bush era White House email archiving, including an analysis by Microsoft comparing backup tapes to emails captured in an archive system (.pdf)
- their letter to White House officials urging new action on records retention (.pdf)
- the NARA report on federal records management

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