Archives.gov
My mom emailed me today asking about some statement that George W. Bush made while signing the McCain-Feingold act in 2002. I found links to the press release of the signing, but the links didn’t exist anymore on the new whitehouse.gov. I tried to search for Bush’s press releases using the search field on whitehouse.gov and couldn’t find anything. Any record from pre-2009 seemed to be gone.
I ended up finding the press release via the Wayback machine on archive.org.
This got me thinking though, where are these press releases and the old whitehouse.gov site currently stored? I searched google with the exact title of the press release and came across this:
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020327.html
Which is an archived version of the press release at archives.org, the site for the National Archives. It turns out that the entire whitehouse.gov website was archived before the new website was put in place. You can go and navigate the old George W. Bush whitehouse.gov and pretend like it is 2005 all over again. The front page shows the former President and First Lady walking out of the White House. The whole site is frozen in time at 1/20/2009.
Poking around I found this whole list of different versions of whitehouse.gov that existed during the Clinton presidency.
