U.S. District Court Judge federal judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ruled against the Bush administration in an important court battle over the White House’s problem-plagued email system. As previously reported in this blog, millions of emails are reportedly missing from the White House email archives. Two organizations, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics and the National Security Archive, filed suit in an attempt to compel the White House to release the messages.
The Bush Administration pushed back with a Executive Privilege and claimed that the courts did not have the power to order the White House to retrieve any missing messages.
Judge Kennedy ruled against the Administration and the court cases may proceed.
Since White House offices switched their e-mail systems from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange in 2002, they have relied primarily on a manual process in which email messages are manually named and saved as Outlook .pst files on White House servers. The groups say that not replacing the Automated Records Management System that was abandoned in 2002 with another automated archive system contributed to at least five million email messages being lost, Federal Computer Week reports. The messages that allegedly were lost cover from 2003 to 2005, a period that includes the invasion of Iraq, key developments in the Valerie Plame leak investigation and the government's
response to Hurricane Katrina.
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