In a blow to the Bush Administration, the White House was ordered to preserve all of its email records by U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. The order specifies that the Executive Branch must preserve all records and back-up copies of millions of reportedly missing emails.
“Defendants shall preserve media, no matter how described, presently in their possession or under their custody or control, that were created with the intention of preserving data in the event of its inadvertent destruction,” wrote Kennedy. The order was sought by the National Security Archive, a public interest library at George Washington University, and the Washington-based watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, reported the Austin American-Statesman.
The complaint alleges that since 2003 the Bush administration has illegally discarded about 5 million email messages that it was required to keep under records laws. The plaintiffs are demanding that the missing messages be restored using the backup media files and that the administration implement a new “adequate electronic management system,” reported Federal Computer Week.
But because the order is not retroactive, it does not clarify what has happened to the backups since 2003, said Meredith Fuchs, the National Security Archive’s general counsel, to FCW. Concerns that the backups could have been erased in the past four years -- perhaps as part of normal business processes -- coupled with the limited time remaining for the Bush administration prompted the plaintiffs to ask for an expedited discovery process, she said.
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