With White House e-mail, it's click now, repent later

In 1993, in one of the more famous examples of flame e-mails, Linda Tripp sent out a blistering message, calling senior members of her White House office "the three stooges."

It's hard to imagine that happening in today's White House, where "no trail, no trouble" is the unspoken mantra. Such caution prevails that one staffer used erasable magic markers during a strategy session, rather than risk a subpeona.

White House staff chose their words carefully long before the advent of e-mail. And the Watergate tapes proved that conversations don't have to be written to be dangerous. But the point-and-click missives have added a new dimension to White House communication - one with implications ranging from front-page embarrassments to, perhaps, Al Gore's political future.

As Congress and the Justice Department investigate the White House for a potential cover-up of perhaps 250,000 missing e-mails, many of which could have escaped subpoena dragnets, the probes reveal a unique, cautious culture of messaging at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

People outside the wrought-iron gates of the presidential compound might view e-mail as a private, informal way to talk. But the knowledge that everything they write could be scrutinized by both the media and investigators, has inspired an attitude of apprehension about e-mailing, especially among the president's legal advisers.

"E-mails and anything else written was not only discouraged, people were living in fear that the wrong e-mail would lead to a prosecution, or at least several hundred thousands dollars of legal fees," says former counsel Lanny Davis.

In fact, whenever a White House staffer clicks "send," a message reminds them that a copy of their missive is being sent to records management.

When it comes to saving e-mails, the White House is held to a higher standard than the private sector, and even Congress.

Companies that have a policy of saving e-mails usually do so only for three to six months, according to records-management consultants. Many companies consider them the same as phone calls, and don't archive them unless they are equal in weight to a written communication.

But the White House is different. It saves its records for posterity. After President Clinton vacates his office next January, at least 30 million stored e-mails will be deposited with the National Archives, an unfathomable mountain of data ranging from "how about lunch?" to speech drafts, to perhaps more juicy communications.

In the federal government, "retention of records tends to be driven by ... the need to inform a free society and the need to retain information of historical consequence. For most businesses, neither of those issues are on the radar screen," says Patrick Cunningham of Hewitt Associates, a management consulting firm in Lincolnshire, Ill. "Do we need to see Monica Lewinsky's e-mail messages to various Executive Office persona? Certainly, because they are material to an historical event - the impeachment of the president...."

On Capitol Hill, e-mail archiving is at the discretion of the lawmaker. Ironically, the office of Rep. Dan Burton (R) of Indiana, who last week grilled White House counsel about the missing e-mails, stores its electronic messages for a mere week, then overrides them with new work.

The White House, on the other hand, installed an e-mail archiving system in July 1994, after a court ruled that electronic records must be preserved in the same way as federal records. It was such a novel concept at the time that it had to be custom-built.

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