- The White House hid thousands of e-mails containing information
on Filegate, Chinagate, campaign finance abuses and Monica Lewinsky, all
of which were under subpoena by a federal grand jury and three congressional
committees, a former White House computer manager says. Sheryl L. Hall,
chief of White House computer operations who has since moved to a similar
position at the Treasury Department, said administration officials covered
up the fact that electronic messages from August 1996 to November 1998
had not been surrendered, as required by law, deciding instead to label
them as "classified" documents. She said the cover-up was part
of a bid to delay the investigations into 2001. "Contractors working
at the White House discovered the glitch showing that 100,000 White House
e-mails involving nearly 500 computer users had not been located during
the document search," said Mrs. Hall. "When the contractors told
the White House about the problem, they were threatened, warned not to
discuss it. They were told the documents were classified. "In fact,
a White House official told one of the contractors they had a jail cell
with his name on it if he discussed the matter," she said.
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- At least 4,000 of the e-mails involved or related to
Miss Lewinsky, the former White House intern with whom President Clinton
has admitted having a sexual relationship, she said. The veteran computer
manager, who left the White House after being demoted for questioning the
propriety of the administration's use of a database system for political
purposes, has since become a critic of the White House. She has accused
first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and nine White House political appointees
in a pending lawsuit of job harassment and reprisals for her complaints.
The suit has been filed in U.S. District Court in Washington by Judicial
Watch, a public interest law firm. In addition to the Lewinsky messages,
she said hundreds of other e-mails included references to the White House's
receiving secret FBI files on former Reagan and Bush administration officials;
information on the selection of corporate executives for overseas trade
trips; and messages concerning campaign finance activities in the 1996
election. She said the glitch was first discovered in May 1998, when the
contractors traced a programming error on one of four White House servers
back to August 1996. The error involved e-mails to and from 464 White House
computer users and the problem was not fixed until November 1998. The White
House e-mails had been sought under subpoena by a federal grand jury, the
Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and
the House Government Reform Committee. They also were sought by Judicial
Watch in separate pending suits involving Filegate and Chinagate. Mrs.
Hall, who was assigned to the White House in October 1992 from the Naval
Sea Systems Command, said the missing e-mails were discovered when the
contractor, Northrop Grumman Corp., found that one of the four White House
Lotus Notes e-mail servers handling the mail for about 500 computer users
had been mislabeled and that a White House search of electronic messages
under the subpoenas was incomplete. She said e-mails from that server were
not properly managed for a two-year period - meaning they were not collected
by the mainframe computer during the subpoena record search. Mrs. Hall
said White House project directors, Mark Lindsay and Laura Crabtree, were
told by Northrop Grumman of the glitch but chose not to make the problem
public. "There's no doubt they knew the search had not been complete,
and the missing records included those involving Miss Lewinsky and other
matters of concern," she said. "They could have retrieved the
documents, and they should have done it forthrightly." Mr. Lindsay,
head of the White House Office of Management and Administration, did not
return calls seeking comment. Miss Crabtree, customer support branch chief
at the White House who has since moved to the Labor Department, was unavailable
for comment.
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- White House spokesman James Kennedy said administration
officials made "a good faith effort to respond in a timely fashion
to all requests for information" sought under subpoena, but declined
to elaborate. "We generally do not discuss the details of particular
requests," he said. Mr. Kennedy would not address Mrs. Hall's accusation
that 100,000 electronic messages were not turned over, saying he was "not
going to get into the specifics of any allegation." Northrup Grumman
spokesman Larry Hamilton, who said he was unfamiliar with the White House
contract and would check with others at Northrup Grumman to determine what
might have happened, did not call back. In her pending lawsuit against
Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Hall said the first lady oversaw the political misuse
of the White House Office Database (WHODB). Her lawsuit says she was abused
at Mrs. Clinton's behest after voicing objections to using career White
House employees and the WHODB system for illegal political activities.
The political activities are not detailed in the suit, but Mrs. Hall's
complaint quotes from an October 1998 report by the House Government Reform
Committee saying senior White House officials used the $1.7 million WHODB
system to "advance the campaign fund-raising objectives of the Democratic
National Committee." After she voiced her concerns, Mrs. Hall was
replaced by Miss Crabtree.
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- In her suit, she said Michelle Peterson of the White
House Counsel's Office told her administration strategy about subpoenas
was to "stall because we had just a couple of more years to go."
Miss Peterson has denied the accusation. The White House called the charges
"baseless." But, Mrs. Hall said, the decision to hide the e-mails
from the grand jury and the committees was part of a "continuing campaign
by the White House to delay and impede" the investigations.
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