File this under IOKIYAR (It’s OK if you’re a Republican), but Congressman Darrell Issa, who’s district touches South OC, has issued a letter warning the Obama administration to preserve emails.
from CNN:
“As you know, any e-mail sent or received by White House officials may be subject to retention under the Presidential Records Act (PRA),†Issa wrote Craig in the letter.
“The use of personal e-mail accounts, such as Gmail to conduct official business raises the prospect that presidential records will not be captured by the White House e-mail archiving system. Consequently Gmail users on the President’s staff run the risk of incorrectly classifying their e-mails as non-records under the [Presidential Records] Act.â€
A White House spokesman told CNN Thursday that all staff were told to forward any official correspondence to their White House e-mail accounts, and added that private e-mail accounts are no longer being used.
More after the jump:
“In order to ensure that they were accessible in the first hours and days of the administration, some staff members created email accounts from which to conduct official business before their government accounts were operational,†a spokesman for the White House said in an email to CNN.
Funny.  Rep. Issa was an apologist for the loss of  tons of emails from the Bush White House routed through RNC servers that went missing.Â
Mother Jones Magazine reported last March:
“During a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the preservation of White House records, an indignant Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a frequent critic of Chairman Henry Waxman’s investigations, did his best to play down the extent of the Bush administration’s now well-documented email archiving problems. Defending the White House’s decision to switch from the Lotus Notes-based archiving system used by the Clinton administration, Issa compared the the software to “using wooden wagon wheels” and Sony Betamax tapes. To observers of the missing emails controversy, Issa’s comments seemed little more than an attempt to deflect blame from the White House for replacing a working system for archiving presidential records with an ad hoc substitute. But to IT professionals who use Lotus at their companies, Issa’s remarks seemed controversial, if not downright slanderous. Now, according to an executive at IBM, the software’s manufacturer, the California congressman has apologized for his characterization of Lotus and offered to correct the congressional record.”
MJM writer Nick  Baumann wrote: ”
Several IT experts I contacted vehemently disagreed with Issa’s original evaluation of Lotus. David Gewirtz, a former computer science professor who now publishes industry magazines for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook professionals, called Issa’s statements an “absolute mischaracterization.”
“Lotus Notes is an enterprise class, high performance, very, very up-to-date high-level software,” Gewirtz says. “It went through its most recent upgrade 3 months ago, and it’s deployed in some of the world’s largest enterprises. It’s one of the best.”
Jeff Schiller, the Network Manager and Security Architect at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agreed with Gewirtz’s assessment. “There are some very innovative features to Lotus Notes that nothing else duplicates,” he said. “I suspect it is actually superior technologically” to competing products.”
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Hypocrisy, they name is Issa.