A large number of executive branch e-mails - the Bush administration sent about 200 million - were, therefore, lost to posterity, undoubtedly saving certain Reagan and Bush administration figures from embarrassment, and possibly legal action, in their retirement. That administration, like the Reagan administration (which installed the first White House e-mail system) before it, did not maintain e-mail archives despite the 1978 Presidential Records Act’s mandate that all presidential and vice presidential records be preserved. The Clinton administration, Newsweek explained, had set up the archive in the wake of a lawsuit “that prevented 6,000 White House e-mail backup tapes from being erased” near the end of the George H.W. In reality, the administration “had simply shut down the Clinton automatic e-mail archive,” supposedly because of a server switch, wrote Newsweek. Bush administration, which destroyed videos documenting the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) torture of detainees, claimed to have lost some 22 million e-mails over the course of six years, including all e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney during certain periods. The Obama administration also destroyed all e-mails related to the operation that culminated in the alleged death of Osama bin Laden. Obama later lied about his knowledge of this server, the existence of which enabled Clinton to withhold documents related to the Benghazi debacle from congressional investigators. The most famous recent example, of course, is Hillary Clinton, who maintained a private, unsecured e-mail server while serving as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state and did not turn it over to the government for archiving after leaving office.
One needn’t go far back in history to find examples of administrations that “lost” or destroyed documents or e-mails, often those with political implications. “One understands the political motivation for it,” he explained, “but to eliminate small political risks by destroying major elements of history is, frankly, an obscenity.” “We are told that destruction of records is occurring now in different parts of the Obama administration in different departments or agencies.” “Past administrations of both Democrat and Republican players have engaged in mass destruction of records as they left office,” Assange said in a livestreamed press conference Monday. The Obama administration, in its waning days, is busily destroying public records to protect its image, charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
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