What to do about it all?
Let's recap some of what we know:

• Most of the White House email archive is stored in very flawed PST files, many of which may already be corrupted.

• Both the White House and certain Congress members are dangerously mischaracterizing Lotus Notes, giving a seemingly plausible but completely misleading excuse for migration.

• Claims of costs for data recovery are highly inflated, possibly as a way to dissuade Congress from pushing recovery.

• There is nobody at the White House who owns the RNC problem and the RNC has refused to restore White House emails from their servers.

Will we ever get all the records we want? Probably not. Will the National Archives have a complete record library of the Bush years? Probably not.

But perhaps this isn't the battle we should be fighting. In fact, I believe and strongly recommend to Congress that they consider changing their priorities. They need to change the underlying conditions that made this mess possible. They need to revise the Hatch Act to remove the loophole of non-governmental email.

In Where Have All The Emails Gone?, I made six formal recommendations:

• The Hatch Act is in conflict with national security concerns with regard to White House email and must be amended to allow, if not require, White House staffers to use secured government systems for all email communication -- political or otherwise.

• White House email needs to be managed by a dedicated IT team that lives across administrations, with a professionalism and procedural base similar to the Secret Service Presidential Protective Detail.

• Political email for incumbents also needs to be managed by the same team.

• Archiving needs to be managed by this same IT team, and the entire cumulative library of archives will need to be checked and migrated every four years as technology and file formats change.

• We need a better understanding of phone/BlackBerry use, especially if these things get lost. I recommend that all mobile phones used by White House staffers be managed by this same IT team.

• Although not directly an email issue, the conflict between the intent of the Presidential Records Act and Executive Order 12,233 needs to be explored. Information must be made free.

If anything, the hearings this week have reinforced just how important my recommendations are. These six steps may be the only path that will prevent the problems explored by the Committee from happening with future administrations.

Denise Amrich is co-founder and managing editor for ZATZ Publishing. She can be reached via email at denise@zatz.com.