There were three groups of people at the hearings. First, there were the members of the committee, both Republicans and Democrats. Next, there were representatives from the National Archives. And third, there were representatives from the White House Office of Administration.

In a sense, there's a push-me-pull-you contest going on between the National Archives and the White House. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is tasked with storing all Presidential records once a President leaves office. This is a big task and NARA's been trying to get email records from the current White House for a few years now.

The Honorable Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States is a man so soft-spoken that members of the Committee had to repeatedly instruct him to speak up. The key message he presented is that while he's responsible for archiving Presidential records, he has no authority to get them. All he can do is ask the White House, and if the White House doesn't comply, he reports that to Congress.

He, and his support staff, testified that they'd repeatedly made requests for records, and those records were, in the main, not provided. One has to wonder, though, how forcefully he's being in trying to do his job. If he's so mousy in the hearings that the members could barely hear him, how can we be sure he's doing everything to make himself heard by the White House?

Representing the White House were Alan R. Swendiman, Director, Office of Administration and Theresa Payton, Chief Information Officer, Office of Administration, who works for Swendiman. Swendiman, a former Jackson & Campbell attorney, who contributed $2,000 to the Bush-Cheney primary campaign and $250 to the RNC in 2004, has been at the White House since November 2006. Payton, the person in charge of the White House IT operations, has only been there since May of 2006.

The fact that these two key people were essentially new hires meant that the Committee got virtually no useful information from them regarding the email messages that went missing between 2003 and 2005. The net result was a lot of testimony went something like this:

Ms. PAYTON. That document had not been made aware to me. I know that we produced a lot of documents in response to this. So that document must not have been on the radar of my team to inform me.

Ms. NORTON. My goodness, I don't know how you did your job. You seem to have known nothing about it.

Archiving to PST files
As I mentioned above, I haven't fully evaluated all of the technical supporting information provided to the Committee. That said, one statement made by Ms. Payton jumped out at me:

Ms. PAYTON. Mr. Tierney, if I might, we still have PST files that we have not been able to associate with a component. I am assuming that was the same case back in 2005, but I do not know that for sure. They contain l7 million emails.

Yes, boys and girls, the White House archives its email to PST files. In his interrogatory, McDevitt states: