Don’t worry, we’ll find the e-mail. Promise.

May 4, 2000

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth doesn’t trust the White House to
search for some million “missing” West Wing e-mails under subpoena, even
though it’s hired “independent” contractors to track them down. So he’s
going to order his own search.

In fact, the White House’s search-and-rescue mission looks like just
another stunt to block investigators from seeing unsearched e-mails from
Monica Lewinsky, Democratic National Committee officials and others.

For starters, the lead contractor on the $3 million job has
practically no experience in computer forensics and has only been in
business a few years. Last year it posted a puny $150,000 in sales — 10
times less than its share of the White House contract.

Springfield, Va.-based ECS Technology Inc., with three employees, is
so small that its voice mail wasn’t even working properly when
WorldNetDaily first called in early April, after the White House
announced the contract to Congress. The House Government Reform
Committee is holding new hearings on the e-mail search yesterday and
today.

How did ECS win the bid? As a minority-owned small business, it
didn’t have to. The White House picked it — as well as its
subcontractor, which is a no-no under Federal Acquisition Regulations.

Here’s the inside story on the inside job.

As a so-called 8(a) minority vendor, ECS is allowed to subcontract
with a large business. ECS hooked up with SRA International Inc., a
large “Beltway bandit” that handles a lot of federal computer database
contracts.

How did ECS find SRA? It didn’t. It was an arranged marriage. And
White House officials conducted the ceremonies.

ECS owner Tung Q. “Eric” Duong told WorldNetDaily he didn’t know
anything about Fairfax, Va.-based SRA until the White House introduced
him to SRA executives at a White House meeting in March.

The White House, on the other hand, is very familiar with SRA.

The contractor employs two former senior White House officials who
allegedly dragged their feet in restoring a three-year gap in West Wing
e-mail, which doesn’t include a whole separate trove from Vice President
Al Gore’s office. (Top aides to President Clinton, including Chief of
Staff John Podesta, have known about the gap since at least June 1998.)

Until January, SRA executive Dotti Cleal managed the White House’s
computer operations, including the e-mail system. A Feb. 5, 1999,
internal White House memo shows Cleal was involved in a White House plan
to spin Congress in case it found out about the omitted e-mail. Another
recent SRA hire is John Dankowski, who came aboard in September after
running White House operations.

Both worked closely with Mark Lindsay, director of White House
management and administration. He’s the Clinton appointee who Northrop
Grumman computer contractors say threatened them with jail if they
mentioned the e-mail hole to anyone — including their spouses.

Yet another senior Clinton administration official, Mary Ellen
Condon, joined the SRA team recently. In December, she took over several
of SRA’s key government accounts after running the Justice Department’s
information-management and computer-security operations.

In other words, one of the supposedly “private,” “third-party”
contractors hired to find the subpoenaed White House e-mail is stacked
with ex-Clinton officials.

Federal contracting laws limit the amount of work a large contractor
like SRA can perform for an 8(a) contractor like ECS. This is to prevent
a large contractor from using a small one as a front to get a contract,
and to do all the work otherwise reserved for the small contractor.

By law, ECS needs to do at least 51 percent of the work. The White
House split the contract — surprise — 51 percent for ECS, 49 percent
for SRA.

But that still means ECS must provide 51 percent of the work,
equipment, materials and labor. And it has to bill for over $1.5 million
of the work.

For the White House to award ECS the contract, the Small Business
Administration had to certify that ECS is capable of performing the
work. At least that’s the normal procedure.

Trouble is, ECS doesn’t seem capable of doing the majority of the
work. In fact, Duong told WorldNetDaily he’s counting on SRA to be his
“mentor” on the job.

So what’s that make Duong? Apparently, a straw man.

The contract price also smells fishy.

The White House was able to award ECS the contract on a “sole-source
basis,” or without open bidding, because it’s minority-owned. Contracts
over $3 million have to be competed among minority-owned contractors.

Again, how convenient: The $3 million figure is high enough to reward
loyalty, but not so high that the White House couldn’t hand pick a
vendor small enough to manipulate.

Government contractors familiar with White House computer operations
tell WorldNetDaily that the contract price has been amply padded.
Restoring the e-mail back-up tapes to a searchable format shouldn’t cost
anywhere near $3 million, they say.

In fact, a secret White House estimate put it at half that. In a 1998
memo, White House computer specialist Tony Barry proposed spending $1.7
million to reconstruct the computer tapes and produce the stash of
unarchived e-mail.

But here’s what’s really strange: The White House is willing to pay
new contractors millions of dollars to come in and fix a problem that it
claims was caused by an old contractor.

That’s right, the White House maintains that the e-mails weren’t
archived thanks to a 1996 “programming error” by Planning Research
Corp., which held the White House computer contract before Northrop
Grumman.

If that’s true, why isn’t the White House sticking PRC with the bill?

But wait, there’s more.

On March 30, White House Counsel Beth Nolan promised Congress the
private e-mail sleuths would find the subpoenaed e-mail by October — or
maybe longer, depending on how the “project proceeds.” She says they’ll
need at least six months.

Computer experts from Compaq, Microsoft, Boeing and others all laugh
at the White House timetable. They tell WorldNetDaily they could secure
and spit out the e-mail for prosecutors in a matter of weeks.

Of course, the White House is really just trying to push the
production of evidence out past the November election, where it can’t do
damage to Gore, and even past the end of Clinton’s term.

And what better way to ensure the process drags out that long than to
have ex-Clintonites working on the inside of the “outside” project?

Just to be sure, Nolan has bought an extra insurance policy.

She says the contractors will do a “rolling production” of the
e-mail, with the first batch coming out in six months. So don’t expect
everything at once.

What’s more, she’s dictating the sequence of production, with the
latest e-mails coming first. The first batch of e-mails will be from the
June 1, 1999, back-up tapes. And the last batch will contain e-mails
from 1996, when Gore was shaking down nuns at a Buddhist temple
fund-raiser and when the whole Chinagate scandal first broke.

White House spokesman Jim Kennedy assures investigators that the
White House is continuing to “work hard to reconstruct and search the
back-up tapes and produce the relevant information.”

Oh, it’s been working hard all right — on a wickedly brilliant
scheme to keep stonewalling while making it appear it’s cooperating.

Looks like the Clinton White House has pulled another fast one.
Luckily, Judge Lamberth knows better than to trust it to police itself.
His next step should be to send agents into the White House to wrest
control of the e-mail tapes and send the White House’s hand picked
“independent” contractors packing.