Cut-Rate Diplomas:How doubts about the government’s own “Dr. Laura” exposed a fraud

Laura L. Callahan was very proud of her Ph.D. When she received it a few years ago, she promptly rewrote her official biography to highlight the academic accomplishment, referring to it not once or twice but nine times in a single-page summary of her career. And she never let her employees at the Labor Department, where she served as deputy chief information officer, forget it, even demanding that they call her “Doctor.”

Callahan’s management style had always been heavy-handed. Once, while working in a previous supervisory role at the Clinton White House, she reportedly warned computer workers to keep quiet about an embarrassing server glitch that led to the loss of thousands of archived e-mails covered by federal subpoena. But with her newly minted Ph.D., Callahan became intolerable, several employees say, belittling and even firing subordinates who did not understand the technical jargon she apparently picked up while studying for her doctorate in computer information systems.

One employee was skeptical of Callahan’s qualifications, however, and began quietly asking questions. The answers worried him, especially after Callahan was hired in 2003 as the Department of Homeland Security’s deputy chief information officer. His concerns and the resulting investigation ultimately revealed a troubling pattern of résumé fraud at federal agencies, including several charged with protecting Americans from terrorism. The scandal raises serious doubts about the government’s ability to vet the qualifications of public employees on whom the nation’s security depends.

“When she was running around telling people to call her ‘Dr. Callahan,’ I asked where she got her degree,” says Richard Wainwright, a computer specialist who worked for Callahan at Labor for two years. “When I found out, I laughed.”

It turns out Callahan got her precious sheepskin from Hamilton University. Not Hamilton College, the highly competitive school in Clinton, New York, but Hamilton University, the unaccredited fee-for-degree “distance learning” center in Evanston, Wyoming, right on the Utah border. Such diploma mills frequently use names similar to those of accredited schools.

Unbeknown to Callahan, Wainwright had once lived near the small town of Evanston (population: 10,903) and knew it well. As a student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he received his bachelor’s degree years ago, he had made beer runs to Evanston, less than 60 miles away. He knew there were no universities there, or at least none worth attending. “Evanston doesn’t have much but a few motels and liquor stores,” he tells me. “I looked up Hamilton University on the Web and saw it was an old Motel 6, and I knew it was bogus.”

Indeed, the old motel lobby is clearly visible in a photo of the main entrance to Hamilton posted on the home page of the school’s Web site at hamilton-university.edu. Click on “Campus,” and you’ll find more photos of the converted motel, as well as another small building on the campus, shot from a sharp angle to make it appear large and august.

If the other building looks like a church, that’s no illusion. It is a church—sort of. Callahan’s alma mater is run by the Faith in the Order of Nature (FION) Fellowship Church, also in Evanston. In fact, the church is headquartered at the same address as Hamilton, which was organized as a “nonprofit theocentric institution of higher learning” in 1976 and claims a religious tax exemption.

Here’s where it really gets weird. FION believes all life forms, including bugs and trees, are created equal and should be treated with equal respect. It feels the same way about education.

“We accept all education as equal in Nature,” according to the church’s stated doctrine. “We offer recognition and special designations to those who have achieved higher levels of understanding regardless if obtained naturally or formally.” Apparently that’s how it got into the diploma business. FION’s Web site describes Hamilton University as “a Nature-based institution of higher learning, which grants university level degrees that are based in whole or in part of [sic] education obtained through Nature.” Since there’s little, if any, coursework required, call it education by osmosis.

But this Nature isn’t free. Tax-exempt Hamilton, with a staff of three, charges a flat fee of $3,600 for nature lovers in need of a Ph.D., while certifying that all its degrees are accredited “based on the rigid accrediting standards of the American Council of Private Colleges and Universities.” And not to worry, Hamilton’s Web site assures future graduates: “All transcripts carry the ACPCU seal.”

What it doesn’t mention is that ACPCU is a fake accrediting agency that the FION church set up to accredit Hamilton. The U.S. Department of Education does not recognize ACPCU as a legitimate accrediting body. (Hamilton officials did not respond to requests for comment. Calls go to a voicemail system.)

To get her Ph.D., Callahan merely had to thumb through a workbook and take an open-book exam. The whole correspondence course—which includes instruction on business ethics—takes about five hours to complete. A 2,000-word paper (shorter than this article) counts as a dissertation.

In short, Callahan’s diploma isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Though there is that nice leather-bound holder.

It gets worse. Callahan owes her entire academic pedigree to Ham U. The bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science she lists on her résumé were also bought at the diploma mill.

The high-paid senior official was plainly pulling a major scam. And Wainwright was on to her. “I had finally caught Callahan in one of her lies that she would not be able to get out of,” he says of his unpopular boss.

At the time, Callahan had applied for an important high-level position at the Department of Homeland Security. The job was deputy chief information officer, similar to the post she held at the Labor Department. But this new job required integrating and managing some of the nation’s most sensitive databases in a time of war. Callahan clearly wasn’t qualified, no matter what her résumé said. Wainwright wondered if she could even be trusted with a top-secret security clearance.

After Callahan landed the post in April 2003, Wainwright anonymously tipped off a Beltway trade journal about her phony degrees and fraudulent résumé. Government Computer News broke the story about Callahan, triggering an 11-month congressional investigation that culminated in government-wide reforms meant to curb the use of diploma mills by federal employees, whose tuition is often financed by taxpayers.

“She was in a position where she could cause…damage to the United States,” Wainwright says, speaking publicly for the first time about the case. “And that’s why I did what I did.”

Callahan’s fraud was exposed in May 2003. Curiously, she wasn’t forced to resign until March 26, 2004, after being placed on administrative leave—with pay—the previous June. That means she continued to draw her Department of Homeland Security salary of between $128,000 and $175,000 for nearly 10 months while under a serious ethical cloud. Misrepresenting qualifications on a résumé, an official bio, or an application—including submitting false academic credentials—is grounds for immediate dismissal, according to federal rules written by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Homeland Security officials maintained they were awaiting the results of an internal investigation, which, oddly, was led at one point by the Secret Service, which does not usually investigate such matters. (Callahan is married to a Secret Service agent, but there is no evidence to suggest he took part in the probe.) “We have no reason at this time not to believe Laura Callahan’s credentials,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Michelle Petrovich told Government Computer News on May 30, 2003, months after the scandal broke.

Wainwright, who was interviewed by OPM investigators who knew her degrees were phony, wonders why it took Homeland Security 10 months to confirm what OPM already knew—what he found out in a few minutes of online research. Meanwhile, congressional investigators found that red flags about Callahan’s academic credentials had already been raised in her personnel file at the Labor Department, according to House Government Reform Committee spokesman Dave Marin. Yet no action was taken there.

In fact, Callahan was twice promoted by the department, even as complaints about her promoting unqualified cronies and rewarding them with big bonuses piled up against her at the office of Labor’s inspector general. A confidential 2001 report issued by Assistant Inspector General John J. Getek cited “allegations of waste, mismanagement, fraud and abuse” against Callahan’s office. Another Callahan employee—one of the complainants, who claims she retaliated against him in evaluations and raises—gave me a copy of the report, which concluded that Callahan’s management practices had led to “low morale” among her 60 federal employees and 65 contractors. Callahan and her lawyer declined repeated requests for comment.

It turns out that Callahan’s phony diplomas from Hamilton were backdated. Hamilton boasts on its Web site that it can “custom tailor” degree programs “to meet the needs” of busy professionals. Callahan’s advanced degrees were required for her Labor promotions as well as her Homeland Security transfer. Her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees officially were conferred in 1993, 1995, and 2000, respectively.

Yet in March 2000, Callahan made no mention of the 1993 and 1995 diplomas while describing her educational background under oath in testimony before the House Government Reform Committee. They are also missing from her sworn prepared statement submitted to the panel.

Callahan was called to the Hill then to answer charges by four White House computer specialists who swore she threatened them with jail if they talked, even to their spouses, about a computer coding error that conveniently kept hundreds of thousands of e-mails covered by subpoenas from being turned over to federal investigators of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Callahan denied under oath making such threats.) At the time of the so-called Project X e-mail scandal, Callahan was a supervisor in the White House’s computer branch.

“I’m a graduate of Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, New Jersey,” Callahan said in her opening statement. “And I have numerous certificates and a series of awards and recognitions that I’ve basically been able to achieve over my almost 16 years of federal service.” Callahan then began to tick off all her work-related awards, closing the chapter on her education.

“I do have available for you, if you like, a list of those accomplishments, because I think it helps you understand who I am, because those accomplishments number over 40, and they include recognition from not only [military] commands and agencies for which I worked for, but they also include recognition from outside entities,” she continued in a soft, demure voice. “What I mean by that, to give you an idea of who I am, the outside awards include the 1995 Supervisor of the Year award—”

“Excuse me, Ms. Callahan,” committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) mercifully interrupted. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but your entire record of accomplishments is not necessary at this time. We really want to get on with the questions pertinent to the hearing.”

At no time in the long hearing did Callahan bring up the Hamilton degrees—just a two-year associate’s degree in liberal arts from Thomas Edison State that she got in 1992. That degree is no longer on her bio sheet, replaced by the three Hamilton diplomas. It’s not clear whether the OPM or Homeland Security ever tried to obtain the canceled checks Callahan wrote to Hamilton for the degrees to see if the dates on the checks correspond with the dates on the diplomas.

But investigators with the General Accounting Office (GAO) were able to solve the mystery after several lawmakers asked the watchdog agency to probe Callahan and other diploma mill graduates employed by the federal government. In a May 11 report, the GAO said Callahan received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in rapid succession between March 2000 and June 2000. Since her Ph.D. arrived in March 2001, that means she got all three degrees within a year.

What the report doesn’t say is that Callahan went shopping for her phony bachelor’s and master’s degrees right after her embarrassing House testimony in March 2000 and as she was bucking for another Labor Department promotion that required such degrees. The degrees were backdated to make it appear as if she got them in 1993 and 1995, which would look more plausible on her résumé. The Ph.D.—also backdated, to 2000—closed out the academic package: a three-for-one deal at Diplomas ‘R’ Us.

But at least give Callahan credit for getting her associate’s degree; she did some legitimate schooling after high school, right? Actually, even that is debatable. Much like Hamilton, Thomas Edison administers an external degree program for older students that gives course credits for life and work experience, with no required attendance. It has no resident faculty, no classrooms or library. The SAT is not required, and all applicants are accepted. It’s a noncompetitive correspondence school.

Which raises the question: Was Callahan even qualified for her White House job, which she got in 1996—just before the problems with the computer system for archiving and retrieving e-mails sent to key Clinton appointees? (To this day, none of the “lost” e-mails relevant to the investigations have been recovered, despite a federal court order demanding them.) Amazingly, Callahan, with just an associate’s degree and a few years of computer experience, had direct oversight of the network infrastructure and desktop computing environment used to support the offices of the president and vice president.

Howard “Chip” Sparks, a career White House employee who worked with Callahan (who at the time went by the name Laura Crabtree) did not think she was qualified at all. Sparks, a networking specialist, questioned a technical decision she made in 1997 and practically pulled back a bloody stump. Callahan later warned him in a memo not to question her qualifications again. “Please be advised I will not tolerate any further derogatory comments from you about my knowledge, qualifications and/or professional competence,” she snapped in the March 3, 1997, memo.

At Labor, Callahan eventually got more power (despite being pushed out of the Clinton White House over the negative Project X publicity) and became less tolerant of those who didn’t agree with her. “She had a style where she was right and you were wrong,” Wainwright says, “and if you ever questioned her knowledge, if you were a contractor, you were fired, and if you were a fed [employee], you were banished.”

Then she got the Ph.D. and threw it in all their faces, Wainwright and others say. “She insisted we call her Dr. Callahan,” he says. “And she would belittle people with her technospeak to make them look stupid. In fact, she said most people [at Labor] were basically stupid.” They got the last laugh.

After Callahan’s phony degrees were exposed, Congress asked its investigative arm, the GAO (recently renamed the Government Accountability Office), to audit other federal agencies to find out how widespread the problem of bogus academic credentials is inside the government. Congress also wanted to get a sense of how much, if any, federal money pays for tuitions at diploma mills.

Looking at the personnel of eight federal agencies chosen at random, the GAO found that 463 employees showed up on the enrollment records of just three unaccredited schools. (It actually looked at four colleges, but only three responded to its request for information and only two fully cooperated.) This was merely a sampling of the dozens of mills operating nationwide, not an exhaustive audit; given the limited nature of the GAO’s investigation, the true number of federal employees who are academically unqualified to fill the positions they hold could be in the thousands.

Agencies tasked with defending America from terrorism were among the top employers of workers with phony diplomas identified by the GAO. The Department of Defense employs 257 of them. Transportation has 17. Justice has 13; Homeland Security, 12; Treasury, eight.

The GAO also found that two diploma mills alone have received a total of nearly $170,000 in payments from a dozen federal agencies for tuition for 64 employees. Hamilton University refused to cooperate with the GAO in its audit of federal payments for student fees, so it remains unclear whether Callahan’s tuition was subsidized.

But as a serial fake-diploma shopper, Callahan is one of the worst offenders among the senior officials identified from the eight federal agencies the GAO surveyed. At least 28 senior-level employees had degrees from diploma mills, the GAO found, while cautioning that “this number is believed to be an understatement.” Among them: Daniel P. Matthews, chief information officer for the Department of Transportation (which oversees the Transportation Security Administration), who got his $3,500 bachelor of science degree within eight months from diploma mill Kent College in Mandeville, Louisiana, and three unnamed managers with super-secret Q-level security clearance at the National Nuclear Security Administration—including an Air Force lieutenant colonel who attended no classes and took no tests to get a promotion-enabling master’s degree from LaSalle University, a diploma mill affiliated with Kent College and also based in Mandeville. No word yet if they, too, will be forced to resign, or if it will again take the news media to drum them out of office.

The GAO report has prompted the OPM, which conducts background checks on new federal hires, to crack down on the résumé cheats, who short-cut their way to the top and undermine those employees who work long and hard for legitimate degrees and who might get passed over for a raise or promotion. The agency is revising its hiring and background investigation forms to emphasize that degrees must be from accredited schools. It also has authorized more money for background checks so job applicants’ academic credentials can be more thoroughly investigated. Down the road, U.S. senators are considering legislation to ban agencies from paying for courses from unaccredited schools. (Congress is not immune to the scam. In fact, an aide to the Senate committee that investigated the Callahan scandal had enrolled in an unaccredited school.)

It remains to be seen whether those reforms will help restore confidence in the federal work force. The American people need to know that the best-qualified workers are running the war on terrorism, not a bunch of hacks and cheats.

April 11, 2000

Smoking gun in the e-mail?
Stash, bigger than thought, includes messages from DNC

By Paul Sperry
WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON -- A stash of unrecorded West Wing e-mail totals close to 1 million, not the 100,000 first reported, and includes messages from the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, WorldNetDaily has learned.

The Justice Department's campaign-finance task force has yet to see the trove of e-mail. The unit, which is under Attorney General Janet Reno's direction, has so far charged 24 people in its three-year criminal probe -- all of them donors and, remarkably, none of them DNC or White House officials.

The White House has told Congress it can't possibly know for at least another six months the content or the volume of the unarchived e-mail until it's loaded off of 3,400 emergency computer back-up tapes and searched by private contractors.

But a former White House computer manager tells WorldNetDaily that the number of e-mails is at least 10 times the estimate of 100,000 bandied about in the press. The ex-official says they include a steady flow of messages coming into the West Wing from Democratic National Committee officials.

Also, WorldNetDaily has reviewed a 1998 Northrop Grumman audit of the White House e-mail accounts affected by a snafu involving a critical White House Office e-mail server. The 75-page report shows that much of the omitted e-mail is addressed to prominent figures in several White House scandals.

The officials include: Doris Matsui, Marsha Scott, Sidney Blumenthal, Cheryl Mills, Bruce Lindsey, Erskine Bowles, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Hernreich, John Podesta, Ira Magaziner, Ann Lewis, Charles Ruff, Lanny Breuer and Paul Begala -- as well as President Clinton. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is not in the report.

As previously disclosed, Monica Lewinsky confidants Ashley Raines and Betty Currie also are among those who received e-mail never turned over to Congress and other investigative bodies.

Northrop Grumman computer contractor Robert Haas ran the audit on June 18, 1998, just a few days after he and other technicians discovered that the White House's automated archiving system wasn't scanning and storing Internet e-mail sent to the server used by the Executive Office of the President.

In addition to the audit, Haas did sample searches of some of the unrecorded e-mail on the server. At the time, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had subpoenaed White House e-mail relevant to his investigation of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky case. Haas was secretly tasked with searching for any messages coming into the White House from Lewinsky, then at the Pentagon, to see how many were missed.

He searched Currie's and Raines' accounts and found enough e-mail from Lewinsky to fill an "expandable folder" full of print-outs. Haas testified March 23 that he searched only for Lewinsky messages.

But that's not what White House whistle-blower Sheryl Hall recalls.

Hall, a manager in the White House's Information Systems and Technology Division at the time, says Haas stopped by her New Executive Office Building office not long after he did the searches and told her he saw a lot more than just e-mail from Lewinsky on the server. In fact, he told her the trove of unarchived messages contained smoking guns to a host of scandals.

Hall, a seven-year Clinton White House veteran, says Haas was scared and opened other files during his search to protect himself.

On June 15, 1998, a few days after he told White House officials about the e-mail problem, a high-ranking Clinton official had ordered Haas and four other Northrop Grumman contractors to keep it top secret. Three, including Haas, testified that they were threatened with jail if they talked to even their spouses about "Project X."

Hall, a career civil servant, says Haas unburdened himself during his visit to her office.

"He told me that if the searches had been redone, that different people (than he) would go to jail, and that there was a lot of stuff out there," Hall recalled in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily. "And I said, 'Like what?' And he said Filegate information. Chinagate. Stuff on (Vice President Al) Gore."

She added: "He mentioned that there was e-mail coming in from the DNC."

Hall says Haas was not vague about his charges.

"He was very specific with me, because it was much more than Lewinsky," she said. "And when I asked him, 'Why are you telling me this, Bob? There's nothing I can do. Everybody above me is political.' He said, 'I'm afraid. I'm afraid for my life. I want somebody else to know.'"

How does she know Haas wasn't exaggerating?

"He had a secret file," she said. "He had papers."

Haas, who still works in the White House, denies he was scared for his life and swears he never looked at any other e-mail besides Lewinsky's -- although he searched at least two other e-mail accounts besides Currie's and Raines' for Lewinsky-related messages (he can't recall those other user files, according to House investigators who interviewed him).

But his former Northrop Grumman supervisor Betty Lambuth says Haas was tasked with "other searches" after his June 30, 1998, search for Lewinsky e-mail.

And Lambuth swears that Haas told her he found e-mail related to Filegate, Gore's involvement in Chinagate, as well as Commerce Department trade missions. Judicial Watch Inc., a public-interest law firm suing the White House over various scandals, charges that the White House and the DNC illegally sold seats on Commerce trade junkets to China and other countries. The group has subpoenaed relevant e-mail.

Hall says she didn't hear Haas say anything about the Commerce scandal.

"That came directly from Betty Lambuth, and she had phone discussions with Haas," Hall said.

How many e-mails?
To get an idea of the volume of e-mail that resides on that White House server (which has 100 gigabytes of storage), consider that Haas in just a few searches for Lewinsky e-mail alone produced enough paper to fill an expandable file folder nearly a foot thick.

(The 1,000-plus e-mail cache was handed over to the White House Counsel's Office in 1998, and its contents have yet to be revealed to investigators. White House lawyers now claim the e-mail was "duplicative" of documents already sent to investigators.)

Haas, who recently saved the results of his sample search on an expanded-storage "zip" disk, says he found 400 to 500 e-mails from Lewinsky in just one of Currie's files. Currie is Clinton's personal secretary.

Some estimates put the number of e-mails from Lewinsky to White House officials at about 4,000. But a computer contractor familiar with the White House e-mail system claims it's closer to tens of thousands -- the biggest chunk addressed to Raines, a former White House aide who's reportedly Clinton's goddaughter.

"When I heard the number, I couldn't believe they talked that much," the contractor said. "They must have been busy typing all day long. I don't know if they did any work."

Haas' audit shows that just between May 1997 and June 1998, Raines got 1,477 e-mails from outside the White House (9,958 total). None of it was records-managed and searched for compliance with subpoenas.

Currie's unarchived e-mail includes 811 in-coming messages between November 1996 and June 1998.

Again, this is e-mail that Starr's prosecutors never had during grand jury hearings, and Congress never reviewed during the impeachment hearings.

So what is the total universe of uncaptured White House e-mail on the server?

Haas came up with 246,000 messages. But his audit, which took several weeks of punching up accounts, was limited.

For one, he missed five critical months of e-mail during the Lewinsky probe. His search of unrecorded e-mail ended June 18, 1998. But the "bleeding" continued through Nov. 20, 1998. (The full e-mail gap stretches from August 1996 to November 1998, or about 28 months.)

Also, Haas punched up only 504 accounts. Some 526 were affected.

One White House official not on his master list is Maureen Hudson, deputy director of presidential letters and messages. She shows up on an internal White House memo, however, with 284 "rejected ARMS (Automated Records Management System) messages," the earliest sent in November 1996.

Hall says the Executive Office of the President gets an average of more than 20,000 e-mails a day. The number of Internet e-mails sent to the EOP server over that 28 months works out to close to 1 million, she figures.

By comparison, the White House has turned over a total of just 7,700 pages of campaign-finance-related e-mail records to the House Government Reform Committee.

Who got the e-mail?
Of the 526 e-mail users affected, 464 worked in the White House Office. Another 58 worked in the Office of Policy Development in the West Wing. The remaining four worked in the Office of Administration.

They include the president and his top aides. The list is a who's who of various Clinton scandals.

"Every White House aide whose name has popped up during the parade of scandals was on that server. And those that helped them do their jobs," said the computer contractor familiar with White House e-mail operations. "So it's the executive group. I call it the management group. They're the ones who decide what happens at the White House, as opposed to the Office of Administration or Office of Management and Budget, or any of the others."

For instance, Bowles, Clinton's former chief of staff, got at least 161 Internet messages starting in May 1997. All were omitted.

Bowles met with Clinton pal Vernon Jordan during the Lewinsky cover-up. He and Jordan also met with White House lawyer Cheryl Mills, who defended Clinton in the Senate impeachment trial. A whopping 3,061 e-mails sent to her starting in November 1996 were never archived, as required by federal records law.

Investigators have never seen at least 17 in-coming e-mails sent to top Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey, who is the White House's chief damage-control expert.

Marsha Scott, a close confidant of both the president and first lady, got at least 48 Internet messages that were never archived. Scott is the architect of the $1.7 million WHODB donor database.

Nearly 1,000 in-coming e-mails are missing from the records of Bob Nash, Clinton's director of presidential personnel.

Clinton himself got at least two in-coming e-mails that have yet to be searched. The first one is dated sometime in December 1997.

The first lady and her West Wing staff are not listed among the 526 e-mail user accounts. Hill investigators say they find it odd that none of her staff, particularly ex-chief of staff Maggie Williams, are listed (although her health-care reform czar Magaziner shows up with 3,693 unrecorded e-mail).

"There are some holes here we think," one investigator said.

Someone who corresponded with the DNC was Clinton aide Phillip Caplan. He wrote the White House memo during the 1996 campaign that argued for setting aside $1 million in potential fines for fund-raising abuses -- to which Clinton wrote "Ugh" in the memo's margin.

It's not clear if any of his unarchived memos are from the DNC. But they total 944. The earliest is May 1997, just when the Senate was subpoenaing White House and DNC officials in its Chinagate probe.

Another White House official in the thick of the fund-raising scandals is Doris Matsui. It turns out that investigators haven't seen at least 3,407 of her e-mails, the earliest from January 1997.

Matsui helped organize Commerce's DNC-donor-packed trade trips. And she and her husband, Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Calif., show up on convicted Clinton-Gore fund-raiser John Huang's daily appointment book when he was a Commerce Department official.

Rep. Matsui, moreover, attended Gore's illegal fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles. (In a separate archiving problem, all of Gore's office's e-mail is missing.)

Many of the officials central to the Project X scandal, interestingly enough, also show up on the audit of users whose e-mail was never captured by the White House archiving system.

Virginia Apuzzo, former director of White House management and administration, corresponded in June 1998 with then-deputy White House chief of staff John Podesta about Project X. At least 53 of her in-coming e-mails are missing, while at least 157 of Podesta's are missing.
Sally Paxton (22 missing e-mails) was one of the White House lawyers who helped prepare a false affidavit about the status of White House e-mail archiving to a federal court.
John Dankowski (398 e-mails) is Clinton's former director of White House operations who's now working for a private subcontractor, SRA International Inc., that the White House has in effect hired ostensibly to find all the missing e-mail.
Terry Good (40 e-mails) is director of White House Records Management.
Karl Racine (27 e-mails) is one of the White House lawyers in charge of making sure records are searched to comply with subpoenas.
Dimitri Nionakis, another White House lawyer tasked with subpoena compliance, who has worked with Racine. At least 151 of his e-mails are missing through November 1998.

Nionakis sat next to Lindsey at the March 30 House Government Reform Committee hearing on Project X.

Because of a separate archiving "error," there's another seven-month hole in Nionakis' in-coming e-mail -- lasting from November 1998 to May 1999. As it happens, White House employees whose first names begin with "D" were dropped from the archiving over that period.

The White House had known about the letter "D" problem for the past year. It finally informed Congress last month.

That such "sensitive" e-mail doesn't turn up for high-level White House figures during periods that overlap with White House scandals looks "very convenient," the computer contractor said.

"And then it wasn't corrected when it was discovered by contractors," he pointed out, suggesting a cover-up.

But the White House argues that the e-mail records gaps were caused by "unintentional human error."

"No one attempted to hide responsive information from any investigative body," White House Counsel Beth Nolan told Congress last month.

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