Official: Vague Requests Stalled Tapes

The agency that videotaped presidential coffees for Democratic donors could have provided White House lawyers with a complete database of the footage--if only they had asked, a film agency official says.

The videotapes, sought by Senate investigators since April but just turned over this month, also could have been found earlier if the lawyers had used a simple word in their request for documents: coffees.

“If you wanted us to search for . . . coffees, I mean, quite frankly, I would have thought somebody would have said, ‘Well, give me everything you have on coffees,’ and then we would have produced documents,” Steven Smith told Senate investigators.

Smith, chief of operations of the White House Communications Agency, described to the investigators several ways that the attorneys could have learned his agency had the videotape. He is expected to testify today before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

In a sworn deposition obtained by the Associated Press, Smith described--sometimes with great frustration--why the videotapes weren’t discovered for about six months.

He said one query would have produced immediate results: a request to print out the entire agency database.

After checking with his agency during the deposition, Smith said: “It takes about 30 to 45 minutes to print out one year’s worth of information in a database.”

Smith said the White House lawyers had no knowledge of how the agency operated and kept its records, so questions were never framed in a way that would result in discovery of the tapes.

“The first time I heard the word coffee was on the 26th of September,” Smith testified, later correcting the date to Sept. 30--a day he met with an administration lawyer.

Instead, the lawyers previously submitted a list of names that meant “nothing at all to us,” Smith said, adding the requests didn’t even ask specifically for videotapes. The names produced virtually no results.

The problem was compounded because the communications agency was so removed from political events that for months, nobody there associated the names with the swirling controversy over political donor events in the White House.

“You know, we have no political affiliation at all,” Smith said. “There’s no way--there’s nobody that is smart to be able to tie this type of question, you know, for information to our systems and there needs to be a better understanding of what we do for a living.”