Civil servant: Clintonites hid subpoenaed e-mails

A former career White House employee has charged the Clinton Administration with attempting to hide from congressional investigators and the office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr the existence of potentially incriminating White House e-mail messages.

The e-mail messages were hidden by a software glitch when the White House computers were initially searched in response to congressional and independent counsel subpoenas, said Sheryl Hall, onetime head of computer operations in the Clinton White House. When the glitch was discovered, says Hall, Clinton Administration officials conspired to prevent Congress from receiving the information.

The information that was withheld contained all the incoming e-mail sent to White House figures over the sensitive two-year period from 1996 to 1998. This included messages to President Bill Clinton and his key staff.

A government contractor who discovered the glitch searched the e-mail data and believed it held damaging information relating to the Monica Lewinsky investigation, Vice President Al Gore's fundraising activities, and other Clinton scandals. E-mail messages sent between Lewinsky and White House coworker Ashley Raines were so raw that "it would make a sailor blush," Hall says the contractor told her.

To keep things quiet, Clinton operatives later falsely labeled all the missing information "classified" and code named the matter "Project X."

Another Clinton Denial

On February 15, after the Washington Times originally broke the story, President Bill Clinton denied withholding emails from Congress. I believe that we have complied with every request, and there have been thousands.... There has never been an intentional effort to do that, and I think that we are in full compliance. I believe we are."

"We always make a good faith effort to respond to document requests and we are happy to discuss any concerns people on the Hill and elsewhere may have on these matters," said White House spokesman Jim Kennedy Because of litigation arising from the incident Kennedy declined further comment on Hall's allegations.

Hall was a civil service employee. In 1992, she moved to the White House from the Department of the Navy to help modernize an outdated computer system. After she questioned whether the vast new White House computer data base (WHODB), that the Clintons were creating was necessary, White House political types ostracized her. When Hall told administration officials that the project rang warning bells for her (because it could have inappropriate political applications), her duties were stripped.

'They call it The Tripp Treatment,'" she said. 'I got 'The Tripp Treatment' and this was long before anyone out side the White House had heard of Linda Tripp." Despite the fact that she had no work to do, Hall still reported to the White House and continued to speak regularly with her former subordinates and with the Northrop-Grumman contractors who maintained the White House computers.

Northrop-Grumman had assigned a five-member team to oversee Lotus, a computer program used for e-mails at the White House.

Hall says dig in May 1998 a contractor told her that a large database of incoming e-mad messages to the White House had not been attached to the computer network that was searched to satisfy subpoenas. The problem could have been easily fixed, but was not corrected until six months later, in November 1998. This. was during the height of Starr's investigation of the Lewinsky scandal. Congress, she said, still has not had access to the withheld information.

Hall said the contractor told her that had some of the information contained in the withheld emails been made public earlier several of the Clinton scandals would have ended differently.

"They obstructed justice by threatening contractors not to brief administration officials [about the problem] before they testified" to Congress, Hall charges.

Your Jail Cell

In the days before White House computer expert Daniel Barry was to testify before Congress about subpoenaed e-mails and Monica Lewinsky, the Northrop-Grumman contractor with knowledge about the missing e-mails was warned. to keep Barry in the dark, Hall said. "Another contractor with Northrop-Grumman was told by

Mark Lindsay director of the White House Office of Administration, that Lindsay had 'a jail cell' with that contractor's 'name on it' if he divulged any information on Project X,- Hall stated. "One of these contractors was told by administration official Laura Crabtree that he would be fired if he told Daniel Barry, a Clinton White House Office of Administration computer specialist, about Project YL At that point, Barry was unaware of Project X even though he was about to testify in two days to Congress concerning White House e-mails and Monica Lewinsky As a result of Crabtree's threat, Barry did not have this relevant information about these 100,000 e-mails when he testified to Congress."

What the White House did do was classify the information withheld from Congress.