I just checked with the Dell site. A nice PowerEdge server with 4GB of RAM and four one-terabyte hard drives is $4,377. A half a million bucks will buy you 114 of these servers. And yet, if there are 5,000 PST files with 2GB data each as claimed, you can fit that on less than three of these Dell servers. Even if you went balls to the wall and bought ten such servers, with a capacity of 40 terabytes, you'd spend $43,770, not $500,000.

I don't begrudge the government spending my tax dollars. After all, if I kept my money, I might use it to buy my own servers. But what I do object to is using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

Finally, once again, I need to hit back on the theme of the missing records and use of the RNC email system. When the White House IT people were asked by the Committee members about the RNC email data, they claimed a complete lack of knowledge, stating that the RNC data was outside of their job responsibilities.

And yet, if the Committee really wants to find out the truth of what's out there, and if we really want a comprehensive record of what went on at the White House, it's the RNC records we're going to want. So far, nobody claims to own this problem and the Committee seems unable to force the White House to produce RNC data. Here's what Chairman Henry Waxman had to say on this matter:

The Archives also asked the White House to start recovering official emails that the Republican National Committee deleted pursuant to its policy of regularly purging emails from its servers. These repeated requests have also been rebuffed. In fact, the RNC has informed our Committee that it has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House emails from backup tapes containing past RNC email records.

What to do about it all?
Let's recap some of what we know:

• Most of the White House email archive is stored in very flawed PST files, many of which may already be corrupted.

• Both the White House and certain Congress members are dangerously mischaracterizing Lotus Notes, giving a seemingly plausible but completely misleading excuse for migration.

• Claims of costs for data recovery are highly inflated, possibly as a way to dissuade Congress from pushing recovery.

• There is nobody at the White House who owns the RNC problem and the RNC has refused to restore White House emails from their servers.

Will we ever get all the records we want? Probably not. Will the National Archives have a complete record library of the Bush years? Probably not.

But perhaps this isn't the battle we should be fighting. In fact, I believe and strongly recommend to Congress that they consider changing their priorities. They need to change the underlying conditions that made this mess possible. They need to revise the Hatch Act to remove the loophole of non-governmental email.