On January 15, 2009, Federal Magistrate Judge John Facciola formally ordered the White House to search the entire Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the Office of Administration (OA) to collect and preserve all emails sent or received between March 2003 and October 2005. This includes all Executive Office of the President components’ workstations and portable media.
During this holiday giving season, the NCH Board of Directors urge you to make an end-of-the-year fully TAX DEDUCTIBLE contribution to the NATIONAL COALITION FOR HISTORY (federal tax ID #01-0688590 for federal income tax purposes). Your contribution will help ensure the continuation of our important education and advocacy activities that advance the interests of the historical and archival communities here in Washington.
On December 11, in a letter to Walmart President and CEO Lee Scott, 253 historians from throughout the country urged the retail giant to reconsider plans to build a 138,000 square-foot supercenter immediately adjacent to the Wilderness Battlefield in Orange County, VA. A formal application for the project was filed on December 5, 2008.
The election of Barack Obama is undoubtedly one of the most historical moments of our time. Vitally important to the historical community is the president-elect’s commitment to nullify President Bush’s Executive Order 13233, which made it more difficult to gain access to records after a president leaves office. President-elect Obama was a co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate to overturn the executive order. Senator Obama’s campaign website cites the revocation of the executive order as a priority for his new administration’s government transparency agenda.
On September 20, 2008, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the office of vice president Dick Cheney to preserve all records related to his office and the performance of his duties. The order came as a result of a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, together with the American Historical Associtaion, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Archivists, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and historians Stanley Kutler and Martin Sherwin.
