Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the 110th Congress released a report entitled Interim Report: Investigation of Possible Presidential Records Act Violations (PDF), which came to some disturbing conclusions about the White House's use of email -- and lack of preservation of the message traffic involved.

Let's talk for a moment about why keeping presidential records is important. Sure, there's historical value. It's nice for future generations of historians to be able to go back and learn about the inner workings of a given administration in its own voice. It's also nice for future administrations to look back and understand the reasoning behind certain decisions and actions, to help with future decisions and actions.

But the real juicy-juice in the Presidential Records Act is for the benefit of an opposing Congress, like the one we have now. Email is a very free-form and casual form of communication. You and I say things in email we'd rather not preserve for posterity. The same is true of presidential officials and their use of email. Our favorite congress-critters figure that if they dig through enough presidential email, they'll find something nasty they can use to beat over the heads of their rivals.

So, even though it's the law that presidential administrations keep track of emails sent and received, you can imagine complying is not something administrations do with excessive enthusiasm. And given that the Bush Administration has been more closed to outside scrutiny than most modern administrations, you can imagine that the President's team hasn't gone out of their way to make email archiving a top priority.

Therefore, it's no real surprise that the general conclusions of the report indicate a substantial lack of email archiving:

• Rather than a "handful" of RNC-related email accounts that Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino originally stated existed, or even the 50 that Perino later reported, there were 88 RNC-based political email accounts operating at the White House.

• Of the 88 White House officials who received RNC email accounts, the RNC has preserved no email messages for 51 officials.

• The RNC has preserved 140,216 emails sent or received by Karl Rove. Over half of these emails (75,374) were sent to or received from individuals using official ".gov" email accounts.

• The RNC has preserved only 130 emails sent to Mr. Rove during President Bush's first term and no emails sent by Mr. Rove prior to November 2003. For many other White House officials, the RNC has no email records from before the fall of 2006.

• In addition, there are major gaps in the email records of the 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve emails.