White House: Gore's e-mail system had separate, longer glitch

Missing e-mails may not be available until after November election

By Amy Paulson/CNN

March 24, 2000
Web posted at: 6:35 p.m. EST (2335 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In the wake of the announcement of a criminal probe by the Justice Department, White House officials said Thursday that a second, separate computer problem affecting the Office of the Vice President may have resulted in thousands of e-mail messages escaping the investigative reach of Congress, the Justice Department and the Office of the Independent Counsel.

That separate glitch may still be unresolved, and may have first occurred earlier than the problem with incoming White House e-mail that struck between August 1996 and June 1998, according to the White House officials. Although the contents of those e-mail messages are not known, they could include correspondence regarding the vice president's fund-raising activities, which have been the subject of an investigation by both Congress and a Justice Department task force.

There is no indication that Gore had any knowledge of the problem, but House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Indiana) has said he wants to know why the White House was not more forthcoming about the computer problems, and whether threats were made against contractors operating the e-mail system.

In testimony before the House committee on Thursday, the White House administrator in charge of managing the computer system said he is in negotiations with an outside contractor to sift through back-up tapes in an effort to recreate incoming e-mails from August 1996 to June 1998, but estimated that it would cost $2.3 million and take 211 days -- well after the November elections.

The e-mails, which some have estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, may pertain to ongoing investigations by Congress, the Office of Independent Counsel and the Justice Department, and may have included information regarding former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, as well as campaign finance matters that may involve Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

White House officials Mark Lindsay and Laura Callahan also said Thursday they asked contract staffers not to discuss the computer problems, but rejected claims that those staffers had been threatened.

Earlier in the day, three Northrop Grumman contract employees, charged with operating the e-mail system, said both Lindsay and Callahan had threatened to have them jailed if the problem was disclosed.

House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton

"It's not something that I did. It's not something that I condone and it's not something that I would ever permit if it came to my knowledge," said Lindsay, an assistant to the president and director of White House management and administration, of the alleged threats.

All of the contract employees who testified before the panel on Thursday said the problem was technical in nature, but the White House nonetheless wanted to keep it a secret.

The problem in the automated record management system, known as ARMS, resulted in the improper scanning, logging and archiving of incoming, external e-mails to nearly 500 White House personnel -- many of them high-ranking.

Those e-mails subsequently were not handed over in response to subpoenas by Congress, the Office of Independent Counsel or the Justice Department.

Lindsay, along with Callahan -- a career civil servant who at the time the problem surfaced served as the White House webmaster -- testified before the panel that they were simply following standard White House operating procedures when they instructed the Northrop Grumman team to remain quiet on the issue while the problem was diagnosed and repaired.

Laura Callahan

When asked why some on the team -- including Robert Haas, a systems administrator who said he was told there would be a "jail cell with his name on it" if he disclosed the problem -- recalled having been threatened during a meeting on the issue, Callahan said: "He may be either having a bad recollection or having an overactive imagination with regard to having the threat being made to him."

At the time the e-mail problem was discovered, June 1998, Lindsay was responsible for ensuring the White House operating systems were Y2K compliant.

"I did say that this was a matter that needed to be kept in bounds with those people who needed the information to repair the system," he added, noting that he didn't want to hear of any "water cooler talk" while the White House was under investigation for several matters, including alleged campaign finance improprieties and the Monica Lewinsky affair.

The problem was one of many with the e-mail system and initially was not given priority because of Y2K compliance testing, he said.

Callahan said she became alarmed when, shortly after the problem was discovered, Northrop Grumman employee Betty Lambuth, a manager on the project who no longer works at the White House, came to her with an e-mail exchange between Lewinsky and another woman, Ashley Raines.

"I was very concerned why all of a sudden we had a specific e-mail being brought to my attention when we hadn't even determined the size and scope of the problem," Callahan said. Lambuth said that the e-mail had been found by Haas. At the time, the team was in a "diagnostic mode," Callahan said.

"Whether e-mails were lost or not was a technical conclusion that had not been reached yet. What I asked be done was to conduct an investigation to determine the nature of the problem," Lindsay added.

As a result, it was decided a team meeting should be held to walk through the White House standard operating procedures. "There were already people in the hallway starting to discuss this," said Callahan. "And Mr. Lindsay said we needed to be careful because it was sensitive."

Congressional Republicans, Justice Department on alert

"The big deal is not that a computer technician made a mistake," panel chairman Burton earlier in the hearing. "The big deal is how the White House reacted to it."

Although Burton alleged the Justice Department has remained uninterested in the matter, CNN learned from law enforcement sources Thursday that the department's Campaign Finance Task Force is conducting a criminal investigation into the controversy.

Betty Lambuth

The technical problem was not made public until last month, when former contract employee Lambuth accused White House staff of a coverup in a lawsuit filed by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch.

As part of that lawsuit and a subsequent investigation by Burton's committee, Lambuth claimed she had been threatened with jail if she revealed the existence of the problem. "I was told by a couple of different people that we were not to talk to anyone," she said.

"We were not to talk to our spouses other than those of us who already knew about this particular project. They did tell me that if any of us did talk about this that my staff would be fired, would be arrested and would go to jail," she said.

Some of them felt so threatened by their initial meeting with Callahan and Lindsay that they requested legal counsel, according to Steven Hawkins, the Northrop Grumman program manager.

The technical problem was to be kept so secret that it came to be known as "Project X," and the team, led by Lambuth, held a series of furtive technical meetings at a nearby Starbucks coffee house and Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, to keep the issue confidential.

Lambuth, who was taken off the project in July 1998, has provided an affidavit to Burton's committee that states some of the e-mails contained information regarding various matters under investigation either by Congress or the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation background files controversy, Lewinsky, trade mission information and campaign finance matters.

But Haas said that while he was instructed to conduct a search for e-mails by or about Lewinsky in June 1998, he had not seen e-mails on any other issue. "I found that and I've done no other searches," he said.

The White House has turned over more than 7,000 pieces of e-mail in response to subpoenas in those matters. And most of those who testified Thursday said they did not believe the problem was actually caused by the White House, nor did the White House tell them to destroy any e-mails.

Rep. Henry Waxman

"We didn't know enough about what was going on to be able to say that the White House was obstructing anything," said John Spriggs, a Northrop Grumman senior engineer for electronic mail.

During a lengthy question-and-answer session, the technical team was asked to estimate the number of e-mails that may have been missed in subpoena requests, and whether White House staff could have deleted e-mails before they could be scanned into the archival system.

"We should do our best to clarify the facts," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), the ranking Democrat on the committee. "We have already learned that no one in the Clinton Administration suggested that e-mails be excluded from the ARMS system.

"It's pretty clear that if we didn't find out about this problem independently we were never going to be told by the White House," Burton said.

Meanwhile, in a legal filing in the Judicial Watch lawsuit, the Justice Department said Thursday, "as a result of these allegations, the (campaign finance) task force has begun an investigation into whether subpoenas issued to (the Executive Office of the President) by the task force were fully complied with, and whether persons were threatened with retaliation in order to prevent the existence of the affected e-mails from becoming known to the task force."

CNN's Bob Franken, Pierre Thomas and Ted Barrett contributed to this report.