Congress, like the White House, has e-mail archiving problems  Congressional investigators have been highly critical of the Bush White House for failing to archive e-mail records that are the subject of a variety of oversight probes. But as Roll Call's Emily Yehle notes, Congress's own record on e-mail archiving may not itself be squeaky clean.
"[I]f the House or Senate were pressed to produce those e-mails, it probably would come up with even fewer than the White House," the reporter notes. "Neither the House nor the Senate have a centralized system that preserves e-mails. And they’re not held to public-records laws such as the Freedom of Information Act."
Yehle warns that given the prominence of e-mail communications in recent controversies with criminal implications, the problem with preserving Congressional e-mail records is more relevant than ever.
"Former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) used e-mails and instant messages to send lewd comments to underage pages, and Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) is in the middle of a battle over whether his computer files were legally taken by FBI agents investigating whether the lawmaker took bribes from officials in Nigeria and other African countries," she writes.
But the legislative branch still lacks a single policy for preserving e-mails. Each Congressional office and committee sets its own policy.
Yehle's full story can be read at the Roll Call website by subscribers. An excerpt is presented below.
But Congress is set up as hundreds of autonomous, elected offices — an archivist’s worst nightmare.
“The fact of the matter is Congress still is decentralized. Each Member, each committee makes its own decision,” said Stan Brand, a former House general counsel. “Each office is unique in terms of how Members decide to represent constituents and that flows down to what kind of records to keep. There’s a reluctance to regulate that.”
Still, the importance of such records in government investigations is self-evident: Most recently, critics berated the White House for deleting several years’ worth of electronic records by reusing backup tapes — a move that may have erased important information on the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Similarly, the thousands of e-mails that Members and staffers send every day can re-create the entire legislative process, from negotiations on bill language to discussions of floor votes.
They also include the mundane, the personal, the flippant — and in same cases, the criminal.
 
| 
del.icio.us 
