National Archive Administrator: Obama Records Missing

Posted on Sunday, June 10, 2018 by Post Scripts

Posted by Tina

In 2014 president Obama did a good thing. He signed the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments which for the first time authorized and required electronic records to be stored alongside paper records stored under the 1950 Federal Records Act. The legislation also updated requirements covering the “responsibilities of federal government officials when using non-government email systems” and empowered “the National Archives to safeguard original and classified records from unauthorized removal.” The Archivist was given “the final authority in determining just what is a government record.”

Despite this legislation the Obama administration, which claimed to be the most transparent in history, has been shown to destroy and disappear federal records. Thomas Lipscomb, writing at Real Clear Politics reports:

…the accumulation of recent congressional testimony has made it clear that the Obama administration itself engaged in the wholesale destruction and “loss” of tens of thousands of government records covered under the act as well as the intentional evasion of the government records recording system by engaging in private email exchanges. So far, former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Lynch and several EPA officials have been named as offenders. The IRS suffered record “losses” as well. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy called it “an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws.”

Clearly, America’s National Archives is facing the first major challenge to its historic role in preserving the records of the United States. What good is the National Archives administering a presidential library, like the planned Obama library in Chicago, if it is missing critical records of interest to scholars? And what’s to prevent evasion of the entire federal records system by subsequent administrations to suit current politics rather than serve scholars for centuries to come?

This is a crisis of transparency that goes to the heart of American transparency. Put another way this is a blot on the integrity of the United States. It isn’t just about the corruption of a single president and his administration; it is about the reputation of the United states and her citizens. We the people want and deserve better! This is another reason that the ongoing investigations into the activities of the last administration and the ensuing presidential campaign must continue.

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19 Responses to National Archive Administrator: Obama Records Missing

  1. J. Soden says:
    Monday, June 11, 2018 at 7:46 am

    Even without an “investigation” it is obvious that Obumble has done everything possible to obscure his criminal, unconstitutional activities.
    His shredders have been working overtime.

    Reply
    • Tina says:
      Monday, June 11, 2018 at 10:26 am

      I understand his “library” will be a community organizing center/Obama adoration center. His record will be washed through the Obama “Ministry of Truth”

      “Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 – and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat. (1.7.10) – 1984 – George Orwell)

      Hillary certainly did her part!

      Reply
    • Game50 says:
      Tuesday, June 19, 2018 at 1:29 pm

      J. I quote “people who do not want to disclose the truth are the people who have something to hide” Obama real name Barry Seotoro needless to say…. and his whole Aministration has a lot to hide. .. because they were against the American people….straight to GITMO for Treason..the whole bunch of them and lets not forget the Rino too.

      Reply
  2. Libby says:
    Monday, June 11, 2018 at 12:35 pm

    “… the accumulation of recent congressional testimony has made it clear that the Obama administration itself engaged in the wholesale destruction and “loss” of tens of thousands of government records covered under the act as well as the intentional evasion of the government records recording system by engaging in private email exchanges.”

    Ok, first, private emails never archived are not a “wholesale destruction” of records … because they never existed as records at all. Thomas hyperbolizes; he pushes your buttons which, as I have said before, is much too easy to do.

    Second, you know, Hils wasn’t the only one …

    https://causeofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/CA-Inst-FOIA-to-NARA-re-Carter-Emails.pdf

    And third, Thomas’s dragging a highly professional and competent, truthful and non-partisan government employee, David Ferrerro, into this foray into muck-racking is slimy, to but it mildly.

    https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20130910/101277/HHRG-113-GO00-Wstate-FerrieroD-20130910.pdf

    https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Ferriero-Testimony.pdf

    Thomas is, in fact, merely recycling a Washington Times EDITORIAL of 2014:

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/28/epstein-all-irs-roads-lead-to-the-archivist/

    This only took me half a hour. You all gonna be suckers forever !??

    Reply
    • Tina says:
      Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at 9:25 pm

      Boy are you dumb…even when I put the law right in front of your face!

      When a person works for the government they are REQUIRED to use a secure government server. All of the above named O administration officials used an unsecured private server in an attempt to HIDE government business…not personal business!

      You skip right over key words, don’t you?

      In 2014 president Obama did a good thing. He signed the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments which for the first time authorized and required electronic records to be stored alongside paper records stored under the 1950 Federal Records Act

      .

      and…

      …the accumulation of recent congressional testimony has made it clear that the Obama administration itself engaged in the wholesale destruction and “loss” of tens of thousands of government records covered under the act as well as the intentional evasion of the government records recording system…

      Government employees don’t get to decide what in their correspondence is a government record…the archivists do.

      Employees are REQUIRED to turn over ALL records. See here and here (Cornell Law and justice.gov)

      Both CNN and the NYT reported there were classified documents in Hillary’s “missing” emails.

      What other government official has attempted to hide more than 30,000 emails… or used hammers and bleach bit on devices and then attempted to play dumb before Congress? (You mean, like, with a cloth?) (Huma did that’s who)

      They found other ways to obstruct inquiries into the official records

      CBS reported that in the last year of Obama’s last term they spent $36 million in an attempt to avoid turning over documents:

      The Obama administration in its final year in office spent a record $36.2 million on legal costs defending its refusal to turn over federal records under the Freedom of Information Act, according to an Associated Press analysis of new U.S. data that also showed poor performance in other categories measuring transparency in government.

      A lot of egregious records keeping irregularities happened during the Obama administration.

      When will YOU stop being a sucker to the biggest bunch of corrupt liars to ever serve in government?!!

      Reply
      • Libby says:
        Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at 9:50 am

        “You skip right over key words, don’t you?”

        Sometimes, but not this time. You, however, seem to miss the point of David’s testimony wherein he is crabbing to the Congress that he cannot do what the 1950 law says, as the Congress has SEQUESTERED his funding.

        You remember The Republican Sequester of 2013, don’t you? If you want to fault Obama for something, it would be enlarging on the Act when he knew the Republican Congress would fund no such thing.

        And … never forget … that Hils would not have gotten herself into trouble had our federal government had been running an IT infrastructure sufficient to do business with. That’s what motivated her decision to go to an outside vendor, and that situation … the miserably inefficient federal IT infrastructure … still exists, because the Still Republican Congress is STILL hacking away at the federal budget.

        You keep on … trying to hide from all this … but I will not let you!

        Reply
        • Tina says:
          Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at 1:21 pm

          First of all I want to thank you for engaging in a discussion. I think diverse opinion makes the blog more interesting and informative. So….

          “…he is crabbing to the Congress that he cannot do what the 1950 law says, as the Congress has SEQUESTERED his funding.”

          Oh poor baby! It’s the oldest excuse for not doing your job in the books. A better explanation would be that the new laws Obama wrote were in conflict putting him in the same compromised position that Gov Moonbeam has placed Ca law enforcement with the sanctuary law…rock and a hard place.

          The sequestration bill was a bipartisan bill (174 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted for it in the House) and it was signed by Obama. It didn’t eliminate funds, by the way. It restrained budget increases. It held the departments to a stricter budget…just like most American citizens are forced to do every day! Under Obama the military budget was severely cut…not sure how he got away with that. Whether the congress (Dems or Reps) kept any of the attendant agreements they made to reduce spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling by $400 billion I do not know…I doubt it.

          “Hils would not have gotten herself into trouble had our federal government had been running an IT infrastructure sufficient to do business with. That’s what motivated her decision to go to an outside vendor…”

          What a load of crap!

          Her own testimony indicates otherwise…as does information from the FBI investigation:

          …There’s scant oversight of the way Clinton communicated, and little thought given to how her files might be preserved for posterity—MacBook laptops with outdated archives are FedExed across the country, cutting-edge iPads are discarded quickly and BlackBerry devices are rejected for being “too heavy” as staff scrambled to cater to Clinton’s whims. … it all started with the strange home server. …

          … It all began, according to the story told by Hillary Clinton and her aides, as “a matter of a convenience” after Clinton was named Barack Obama’s first secretary of state. As Huma Abedin—Clinton’s most loyal aide—explained to the FBI during an interview in April 2016, the State Department told Clinton’s team during its January 2009 transition to Foggy Bottom that its tech experts didn’t allow personal email accounts to be installed on government-issued devices.

          Clinton didn’t like the idea of carrying around two devices—one for official government work and one for personal or political correspondence, which is discouraged on government accounts. So she opted instead to carry only a single device, a personal BlackBerry, linked to a newly registered email account on a private domain, clintonemail.com, that was run off a recycled server from her unsuccessful presidential bid the year before.

          The decision to create a dedicated email setup for the former First Lady had evidently begun earlier, at the conclusion of her unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, even before it was clear that her victorious opponent, Barack Obama, would enlist her help in a key role in his Cabinet.

          At the end of 2008, it fell to a longtime Clinton family aide named Justin Cooper to figure out how Hillary Clinton should receive email. … He and another aide, Doug Band, were among the close aides that President Clinton asked to move to New York to help set up his post-presidential life. …

          … In 2008, the Clintons had two primary email domains: wjcoffice.com, which was mostly a legacy domain that auto-forwarded emails to more modern accounts, and presidentclinton.com, which was used by the staff for their email accounts. The email domains were run off of a basic Apple server in the Clintons’ basement in Chappaqua …

          … Cooper says he knew that the Apple server was already outdated by late 2008—Apple didn’t seem to integrate well with BlackBerry’s mail system—and as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was being dismantled, Huma Abedin suggested Cooper talk with one of its IT staffers, Bryan Pagliano, about using some of its leftover computer equipment to update the Clinton family server. Pagliano agreed … Pagliano later told the FBI, he didn’t realize Hillary Clinton would even have an account on the server—he thought it would just be for the use of the existing team of Bill Clinton’s aides.

          At the same time, Abedin and Cooper were discussing what to do with the former first lady’s email. Cooper and Abedin—who had long served much the same purpose for Hillary as Cooper had served for Bill—discussed between them the advantages of a “covert email domain versus a domain including the Clinton name.” Abedin ultimately “blessed off” on using a new domain, @clintonemail.com, to handle the senator’s email. On January 13, 2009, almost two months after Clinton accepted Obama’s nomination, Cooper used an Internet registrar named Network Solutions to register that domain. The next week, Hillary Clinton resigned her Senate seat and was sworn into office as the nation’s 67th secretary of state.

          Her preference for a personal email account was not technically against the rules. At State, FBI agents later found, there was “no restriction on use of personal email accounts for official business,” but employees were cautioned about security and records retention concerns. The State Department told employees that they should forward such emails to their official accounts for recordkeeping purposes. “There were no rules in place that specifically denied Secretary Clinton the use of her private network,” but, according to the State Department IG Steve Linick, private email was “highly discouraged.”

          Officially “discouraged,” sure, but according to many that the FBI interviewed, the State Department’s culture uniquely embraced—and its poor information systems actively seemed to encourage—employees turning to private emails to conduct business. As FBI Director James Comey said in July when he reported the bureau’s findings: “We also developed evidence that the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.” …

          … At some point in the summer of 2009, two State IT specialists summoned Pagliano and asked whether he was aware of the clintonemail.com domain. He said yes. When Pagliano relayed this to one of Clinton’s aides, that person, Pagliano told the FBI, had a “ ‘visceral’ reaction and didn’t want to know any more.” Later in 2009 or early 2010, one of the same State Department employees asked Pagliano again about server, saying it might be a federal records-retention issue and asked him to relay that concern to Clinton’s “inner circle.” Pagliano approached Cheryl Mills in her office and passed along the information. Mills dismissed the worries, saying other former secretaries of state had done the same thing.

          Just how far such concerns about Clinton’s email practices went inside the State Department is still a matter of some debate. An inspector general report on Hillary Clinton’s email reported that two IT staff approached the director of S/ES-IRM, John Bentel, and raised concerns about her email use, only to have him tell them it was approved and they should not discuss the server further. (However, in an interview with the FBI, he denies that any such conversation took place. As he told agents, he doesn’t recall saying that, adding that the account “was inconsistent with his open and welcoming management style.”)

          Yet rather than appearing to be actively covering up Clinton’s paper trail, Clinton’s staffers—harried as they were and pulled in multiple directions by seemingly daily world crises—seemed simply uninterested in the details of record-keeping, either for Freedom of Information Act purposes or for the Federal Records Act, which governs official papers. Nor did they appear particularly curious even about Clinton’s own email setup.

          Hillary’s ignorance/incompetence with computers, her refusal to learn even rudimentary skills like email, and her lackadaisical attitude toward her legal responsibilities are all in play. She definitely believes herself above the law…can’t be bothered.

          I’m not hiding, Libby. I invite and welcome anything you want to bring to this blog and always have.

          That doesn’t mean I won’t post opposing views and information.

          “…the miserably inefficient federal IT infrastructure … still exists, because the Still Republican Congress…”

          Democrats and Republicans over decades have failed to spend money to keep government computers and infrastructure up to date. But this is, in part, a department problem. The heads of departments refused to spend money from their budgets to do what would in the long run save them money!

          Reply
        • Peggy says:
          Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at 2:57 pm

          Remember sequestation was originally Obama’s idea.

          From PolitiFact.

          “Whose idea?

          Some of the most detailed reporting on sequestration is from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and his book The Price of Politics. Woodward’s reporting shows clearly that defense sequestration was an idea that came out of Obama’s White House.

          The intention, however, was to force Republicans to negotiate, not to actually put the cuts into effect.

          Woodward summarizes the thoughts of the Obama team: “There would be no chance the Republicans would want to pull the trigger and allow the sequester to force massive cuts to Defense.” Democrats, meanwhile, didn’t want to see their favorite domestic programs cut.

          “As the administration has made clear, no amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts. Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument. It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction.”

          Still, some people we say that the Obama White House proposed sequestration, so that means Obama owns it.

          Here’s what experts told us last fall.

          “While both parties are culpable for sequestration because the Budget Control Act passed Congress, the president proposed it originally and ultimately owns its outcome,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on defense with the conservative American Enterprise Institute who advised the Romney campaign. “That is because he alone can lead by calling the party leaders together for a resolution today if he wanted as president.”

          Our ruling:

          Rubio said the defense cuts known that are part of sequestration were Obama’s “idea in the first place.”

          That doesn’t tell the whole story — particularly the fact that Obama does not favor these cuts. The White House proposed them as a means of driving the two sides to a compromise over the deficit, not as a real-world spending plan.

          Still, the idea did originate with Obama’s team. We rate
          Rubio’s statement Half True.”

          http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/12/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-sequester-was-obamas-idea/

          Reply
          • Tina says:
            Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at 6:43 pm

            Good on ya Peggy for recalling that little fact!

            “Woodward’s reporting shows clearly that defense sequestration was an idea that came out of Obama’s White House. … The intention, however, was to force Republicans to negotiate, not to actually put the cuts into effect.”

            A perfect example of politicians playing games instead of negotiating in good faith.

            Members of both parties are guilty of this.

            It’s one of the things voters like about Trump. He’s not beholding to his party or any group other than the American people as a whole.

      • Lee says:
        Thursday, June 14, 2018 at 12:57 am

        Tina, just to make sure that you’re not intending to obfuscate the point here:

        “When a person works for the government they are REQUIRED to use a secure government server. All of the above named O administration officials used an unsecured private server in an attempt to HIDE government business…not personal business!”

        The H.R. 1233 clearly states: “Prohibits the President, the Vice President, or a covered employee (i.e., the immediate staff of the President and Vice President or office advising and assisting the President or Vice President) from creating or sending a presidential or vice presidential record using a non-official electronic messaging account unless the President, Vice President, or covered employee: (1) copies an official electronic messaging account of the President, Vice President, or covered employee in the original creation or transmission of the presidential or vice presidential record; or (2) forwards a complete copy of the presidential record to an official electronic messaging account of the President, Vice President, or covered employee not later than 20 days after the original creation or transmission of the presidential or vice presidential record.”

        So while I’m not saying that Clinton actually conducted these provisions of copying these emails to official government servers, to say that government officials are “required” to use government servers for emailing – while the most prudent exercise, is not exactly true.

        Also, your links for CNN and NYT articles: you label them as proof of classified documents in Hillary’s “missing” emails. Actually both articles were simply findings from a random review of emails from Clinton’s personal server, that they contained classified documents. There is no determination in either linked article that classified documents were among the emails that are missing, because no one truly knows what those missing emails contained.

        Reply
        • Tina says:
          Thursday, June 14, 2018 at 10:37 am

          Lee, thank you for pointing out the errors in my communication.

          To be clear, all government employees are “required” to communicate responsibly and keep and preserve complete records of their service.

          Further, it is grossly negligent to play fast an loose with communications since that could put the security of the USA in jeopardy.

          Further, it is the responsibility of the records administrators, not Clinton or her staff, to determine content in her records that are personal and eliminate them from the official records.

          I refer you and our readers to IJR, “3 Federal Laws Hillary May Have Violated By Using Personal Email Accounts for State Business”

          Executive Order 13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code make it unlawful to send of store classified information on personal email. …

          … Section 1236.22 of the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements states that: “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system.”

          The use of a private server, the use of a separate and private email for all/most correspondence, indicates intent to hide communications from freedom of information requests and congressional oversight as well as control over the record keeping process.

          Lee you’re right about the missing emails…I don’t know if the emails that allegedly contained top secret/secret information were among the missing emails that were later recovered or not. I just know it’s been reported that classified information was found in emails sent/received and stored on her private server.

          I couldn’t uncover any reference in my communication that indicated I said there was “proof”…I have referred to “evidence” and “indications” as well as Hillary’s own testimony. Can you clarify on that point?

          Thanks again, I am definitely interested in accurate information on the blog as well as clear communication.

          Reply
  3. Peggy says:
    Monday, June 11, 2018 at 3:21 pm

    Remember when Obama changed the official biography pages of past presidents on the White House website?

    He doesn’t want to leave written documentation of all of his in term failures, but wants future generations to know he was as great as many of our past presidents. What an ego and sick man.

    “President Barack Obama is under fire for adding his own policy plugs to the official biographies of past presidents on the White House website.

    Here’s how it works: The White House added blurbs to the end of these biographies. These “Hey, did you know?” factoids appear on nearly every president’s bio page going back to Calvin Coolidge.

    For example:

    “In a June 28, 1985, speech, Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multimillionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.”

    These added links plug everything from Obama’s health care overhaul to Social Security, Medicare and the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell.”
    http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/17/is-it-appropriate-for-president-obama-to-change-the-official-biography-pages-of-past-presidents-on-the-white-house-website/

    I do wonder how long they lasted after Trump took office. Without written documentation his legacy can be undone as easy as all of his EOs.

    Reply
  4. RHT447 says:
    Monday, June 11, 2018 at 3:38 pm

    Fearless Reader Library.

    Just put up an outdoor basketball court with chain-link fence around it and call it good. Hey, something for the community from the head organizer.

    Reply
  5. Peggy says:
    Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at 8:55 am

    Found records bad news for illegals.

    EXCLUSIVE: NEW USCIS OFFICE INVESTIGATING THOUSANDS WHO GOT US CITIZENSHIP THROUGH IDENTITY FRAUD:
    http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/12/aliens-used-fake-identities/?utm_source=Social&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_campaign=engagement

    Reply
    • Tina says:
      Thursday, June 14, 2018 at 10:39 am

      Thanks Peggy…this is an important story and I will endeavor to put it on the front page. Unfortunately we have the IG report out today and that could take some time.

      Reply
  6. Libby says:
    Thursday, June 14, 2018 at 12:50 pm

    Oh, my god … I’m dyin’ here …

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUymCE04MKI

    I think you wanna drop this whole subject … really …

    Reply

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