Missing drive had no Clinton Administration records, says National Archives

20.05.2009
No original missing at the U.S. National Archives and Recording Administration (NARA), the agency said this afternoon.

The NARA has offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the hard drive. The Archives has all of the original tapes and a backup hard drive containing the same information on the missing drive, meaning no data has been permanently lost.

The agency on Tuesday disclosed that an external hard drive believed to contain nearly 1TB of data from the Clinton Administration -- some of it sensitive information -- had gone missing.

The data on the missing drive included more than 100,000, Social Security numbers and home addresses of numerous people who visited or worked at the White House. Included in the list is one of then-Vice President Al Gore's three daughters. Also on the drive were details about the security procedures used by the U.S. Secret Service at the White House, event logs, social gathering logs, political records and other information from the Clinton administration years.

Bill Clinton was president from January 1993 to January 2001.

According to the statement released this afternoon, the 2-TB drive was being used for "routine re-copying" as part of a records preservation process. The small 2.5-pound Western Digital MY Book external hard drive contained information from about 113, 4mm tape cartridges and weighs about 2.5 pounds. The tapes contained "snapshots" of the contents of hard drives of employees leaving from the Executive Offices of the President and contained both federal and Presidential records.