• Finally, apparently there is evidence that the Office of White House Counsel under Alberto Gonzales may have known that White House officials were using RNC email accounts for official business, but took no action to preserve these as presidential records.

As has been the case thusfar in our special analysis, rather than gather information second-hand from mainstream press reports, we're going directly to the source. In the next few pages, we'll show you our analysis of the report itself and some fascinating facts found by careful reading of congressional testimony.

The House report
Unfortunately, the House report only explores one aspect of the email crisis we've uncovered at the White House: poor archiving. As we mentioned earlier, politicians are more interested in finding some juicy tidbit within presidential records than they are with broader technical implications.

Our analysis has found that the record-keeping issues related to White House email are of the least concern when it comes to national security. Of far more concern are other aspects of White House email that the Oversight committee completely overlooked. It's these aspects we've discovered in our own investigation. For now, though, let's continue with what did not escape the sight of the Oversight committee.

In this case, it's the Democrats chasing after the Republicans, but in prior years, Republicans have certainly done their fair share of politically motivated investigating. Even though this House committee's motivations can't be considered pure, there's no doubt their conclusions mirror some of our observations. Put bluntly, White House record-keeping, as it pertains to email, is for crap.

One interesting aspect of the Committee's report is the use of the word "destroyed", as in this sentence from the report:

At this point in the investigation, it is not possible to determine precisely how many presidential records may have been destroyed by the RNC.

From a technical perspective, we doubt the email messages in question were actually destroyed. We think they were simply not preserved. This seems a subtle difference, but it is major and it reflects the key difference between paper and digital records.

If there were a paper memo and were it to be eliminated in some way, a conscious action on the part of an individual would have had to take place to destroy the paper document, whether by shredding, burning, or giving it to the dog to eat.

Here's what the report had to say:

Whether intentionally or inadvertently, it appears that the RNC has destroyed a large volume of the emails of White House officials who used RNC email accounts. The RNC has told the Committee that it had a "document retention" policy under which emails that are more than 30 days old are deleted. In addition, the RNC has said that individual account holders had the ability to delete permanently emails less than 30 days old. As a result of these policies, potentially hundreds of thousands of White House emails have been destroyed, many of which may be presidential records.