White House Reports Trouble Retrieving Messages
   
By DAVID JOHNSTON New York Times
Published: June 9, 2000

The White House, under pressure to produce thousands of lost e-mail messages sought by Congress, has informed a House committee that it cannot find any backup records for messages sent to or from Vice President Al Gore's office in 1998 and part of 1999.

In a letter on Wednesday to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Steven F. Reich, a White House lawyer, said that because of a problem in the computer system, the White House had no backup tapes for e-mail messages from March 1998 to April 1999.

But a White House spokesman said today that some of the messages might still be found.

Technical consultants have been trying to reconstruct thousands of messages that were subpoenaed in Congressional investigations but were lost, apparently because of malfunctioning computer systems.

White House aides were aware of the problem in mid-1998, but have said they did not realize its scope or significance. Some Congressional investigators have said they suspect that the White House may have used the computer problem as an excuse not to search the e-mail records for evidence.

Today, Congressional investigators said it might never be known whether the vice presidential messages held information that could have served as evidence at a time when the battle to impeach President Clinton was at its height and the Justice Department was investigating possible fund-raising abuses by the Clinton-Gore campaign.

Jim Kennedy, the White House spokesman, said today that the e-mail messages had been lost in a system upgrade and that some might be recovered.

''There are several ways some e-mails may exist, on the computers of individual users, in hard copy or copies sent to other White House users,'' Mr. Kennedy said.

Some employees of Northrop Grumman Corporation, the company that maintained the e-mail system, have said at Congressional hearings that White House aides had told them to say nothing publicly when they discovered that more than two years of e-mail messages were missing.