Office of Trash Compacting Services

If I were heading up the next Administration, I would retain whoever in this White House is responsible for disposing of the evidence.

Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.

"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.

It does sound very tidy. This isn't incompetence, this is a series of regularly scheduled dustings.

As I've said before, recycling the email tapes and copying over old data is a very green way to remove anything incriminating from the files. It's all about the environmental advantages!

Congress is going to have to step in here and mandate methods for communciation retrieval and permanent storage. The Constitution doesn't say much about email, as I remember. As for these thieves, there isn't a jail big enough.