It looks like the Bush administration's effort to accidentally-on-purpose lose thousands of White House emails will pay off.

With only months remaining in Bush's second term, it's highly unlikely congressional investigators will get anywhere in trying to force the administration to produce the missing messages, especially as legislators fan out across the country this summer and fall to campaign for reelection and to support pandering, ineffective feel-good measures like a gas-tax holiday. (Had enough, OPEC, or shall we turn the screws some more?)

Anyone following this long-running saga can conclude only that either 1) The White House IT operation was comically incompetent, or 2) There was something devious and underhanded going on. Of course, if seven years of experience has shown us anything, these options hardly are mutually exclusive for this crew.

Here are some highlights from an excellent article on Ars Technica:

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.

"Did not immediately have a new one to put in its place." Sounds like a war plan I know.

Now we segue from incompetence to something more...

[D]ue to a lack of redundancy and proper access controls, anyone with access to the White House servers could have tampered with or deleted the e-mails in the archives. And without adequate logging facilities, there might be no way to determine who might have tampered with the files or what might have been changed.

How very, very unfortunate -- for investigators! Continuing...

[T]here is also evidence that some senior Bush administration officials have taken to using non-government e-mail accounts as a way to skirt the requirements of federal law. For example, the National Journal has reported that while Karl Rove was working in the White House, he used an outside account provided by the Republican party for "about 95 percent" of his correspondence.

Hmm. Another way of saying "about 95 percent" would be "almost all."

Infuriating as it is, the Ars Technica piece provides a good overview of the White House's foot-dragging and obfuscation over the missing emails.