Press statement

A team of Commission staff has completed its review of 10,800 pages of Clinton
administration White House documents. We estimate that more than 90% of the material
had already been produced, was irrelevant to our work, or was duplicative.

Out of the total, Commission staff identified 12 documents that we consider clearly or
arguably responsive to our requests but had not yet been produced. The White House has
now produced these documents to the Commission. The review team concludes that any
errors in document production were inadvertent.

The Commission staff also identified 57 additional documents, not previously requested
by the Commission from the White House, that nonetheless are relevant to our work.
The Commission has asked for production of these documents. We are making a parallel
request for Bush administration documents.

The process has been constructive.

 liAW,

ARCHIVES REVIEW TEAM FACT SHEET

1. Lindsey March 22 letter: NARA collected approx. 10,800 pages of documents

from Clinton Archives in response to our EOF document requests. Approx. 25%
have been produced to the Commission. EOF 2: 610 out of 3,164; EOF 3: 835
out of 1,761; EOF 5: 232 out of 1,619 or x out of 5,865; specific requests: y out of
90.

2. The Review Team has reviewed or been briefed on all of the documents collected
by NARA. Approx. 1,500 pages involved presidential communications; the
remainder (approx. 9,300 pages if Lindsey's figures are right) we reviewed in
approx. 10 boxes at the Archives.

3. Out of the boxes at Archives, we selected approx. 800 pages of documents for
further review. The documents that we did not select generally fell into these
categories: (a) they had already been produced to the Commission; (b) they were
duplicates of documents that had already been produced to the Commission (often
multiple copies); and (c) they were clearly not covered by our document requests
and were not relevant to our work.

4. Out of the documents we selected for further review, 46 documents had already
been produced to the Commission. The remainder, 47 documents, broke down as
follows: 4 were clearly or arguably responsive to our EOF document requests; 21
were agency documents subject to our agency document requests; and 22 were
documents not covered by our document requests but of potential interest to the
Commission.

5. The Archives collected approx. 1,500 pages of documents reflecting presidential

communications. After setting aside approx. 500 pages of duplicates, there were
approx. 100 documents remaining. Of those 100, 22 documents were not
previously shown or briefed to the Commission but were of potential interest. Of
those 22 documents, 8 were clearly or arguably responsive and 14 were not
responsive. Those 14 non-responsive documents broke down as follows: 7 were
prepared by the Intelligence Directorate regarding MONs; 1 was an Intelligence
Directorate memo to the NSC front office; 1 was distributed within the NSC front
office; 2 were from TNT to another directorate; 2 were prepared by regional
directorates; and 1 was from an unknown category.
MEMORANDUM

April 7, 2004

To: Commissioners

From: Archives Review Team (Zelikow, Marcus, and Dunne)

The Commission has filed six sets of EOF document requests. Responding to the first
five of these so far, the National Archives has produced about 10,800 pages of documents
that archivists thought might potentially be responsive to these requests. As required by
the Presidential Records Act, all of these documents had first been reviewed by President
Clinton's representatives, Bruce Lindsey and Sandy Berger.

The National Archives informed Lindsey and Berger that most of the pages of documents
had not been produced to the Commission by the White House. They in turn told Marcus
and Zelikow about their concern, especially because they thought we had not seen a
particular document connected with a covert action MON. The staff then proposed a
verification arrangement to the White House. That proposal was still being considered
when the story broke last week in the newspapers. The administration agreed to the
proposal that was already on the table.

The three of us reviewed almost all of the 10,800 pages of documents on April 5,
working at the main building of the National Archives. We are grateful to the archivists
who worked late to accommodate us, especially Nancy Smith, who heads their
presidential libraries branch. We marked all the documents we considered relevant to our
work that appeared not to have been produced. Those documents were then copied and
we examined them again, this time at the EEOB, on April 6 and 7. On April 6 and 7 we
also were briefed on a smaller number of documents that involved memos to the
President. Some of those documents were found to be duplicates of each other or of
documents that had already been produced. We then worked through the remainder.

Since the archives has searched the files of many individuals, most of whom had
distributed copies of documents to each other, the documents include a great many
duplicates of documents that have already been produced. They also include many
documents which are unresponsive and of no value to us. The overall effort generally
confirmed the good coverage of our existing document requests.

Out of the total of 10,800 pages, we found 12 documents that we consider responsive, or
arguably responsive, to our document requests but which had not been produced. The
White House agrees with us on a few of these. On the rest we think they quibble about
technicalities. But they are producing all 12 to us now.

There is no pattern to the 12. They do not include the covert action document. We
believe the mistakes were largely inadvertent, or the product of a too literal interpretation
of our requests. We can explain further if you are interested.
We also discovered 36 other documents that we thought were interesting or relevant to
our work, but which were not covered by EOF Requests 1-5. Some of these may be
picked up in EOF No. 6, which has not been processed yet. These include a few
documents from staff offices other than Clarke's, or documents sent from the NSC staff
to OMB.

We have requested production of these 36 White House documents, even though they
were not responsive to our original requests. If the White House agrees, we believe that
our documentary coverage for the Clinton White House would be sufficient, especially
after the processing of EOF No. 5 (they are still producing e-mails) and EOF No. 6 is
complete.

In addition, we found 21 documents sent to or from other agencies, mainly CIA. Many
of these should have been produced to us by those agencies. But we could not remember
having seen them (which does not mean they were not produced).

In this process we located the covert action document Lindsey and Berger referred to. It
was not covered by our document requests. This is because the document was produced
under unique close-hold circumstances. We look forward to trying to explain all this to
you in a classified setting.

This process has also helped us in considering a further request targeted at files of the
Bush administration. For example, we may request documents related to
counterterrorism or UBL-related covert action issues sent to Rice or Hadley from the
NSC staffs intelligence directorate headed by Mary McCarthy and then Mary Sturtevant.