White House to Review Failure to Turn Over E-Mail Messages

The White House said Thursday it is completing an initial review of its failure to examine thousands of e-mails that have never been turned over to Congress in the campaign fund-raising scandal.

President Clinton told reporters the problem “will all be handled in an appropriate way” by White House lawyers. As Clinton spoke, the House Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) was sending a subpoena to the White House demanding records that might explain how e-mails were collected in 1998. That is the year congressional investigators now believe presidential aides discovered that many messages sent to the White House--100,000 or more--had been overlooked in document reviews for congressional probes.

Because of a glitch involving computer codes, many messages sent to the White House from 1996 to 1998 weren’t retrieved from the system. The existence of the messages didn’t become public until a former White House employee testified about them last month in a lawsuit brought by a conservative group, Judicial Watch.

Five computer system employees from Northrop Grumman who worked at the White House told Burton’s panel Tuesday they were threatened and ordered to keep quiet in 1998 by two people from the White House Office of Administration.

The contract employees said they were told “there’s a jail cell with your name on it” if the workers talked to anyone about this, including their superiors at Northrop Grumman, Burton’s staff says.

Burton’s subpoena seeks records from 1998 dealing with “the failure to collect e-mail messages.”

Computer specialists who worked on the White House system told Burton’s staff that among the e-mails are some from former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky after she had been transferred to the Pentagon.

It is unclear whether copies of those e-mails were turned over to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr in 1998 in his perjury and obstruction investigation of the president.

“While we’re not interested in those, we would be interested in any e-mails pertaining to our several investigations; for instance, any e-mails from the Democratic National Committee to White House personnel,” said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Burton’s committee.

“I have referred all the questions” on the e-mails “to the counsel’s office. . . . I think they will handle it just fine,” Clinton said.