White House Ordered To Preserve E-Mail Tapes
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In an unusual edict issued on a federal holiday, a federal judge has ordered the White House to preserve all back-up tapes for its main e-mail system in case they could help recover what a watchdog group has estimated are 5 million e-mails missing from the White House’s main archiving database.
The Justice Department had opposed the order as unnecessary because White House officials were willing to sign a sworn declaration stating their intention to preserve the tapes. However, Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. yesterday adopted a magistrate’s recommendation that the White House be ordered to preserve the records.
“Unlike a court order, a declaration is not punishable by contempt. In other words, without such an order, destruction of the backup media would be without consequence,” Magistrate John Facciola wrote last month.
Judge Kennedy ordered the White House to preserve any type of back-up “media,” to keep it in a fashion that will allow it to be accessed later, and not to transfer it out of White House control without permission from the court.
“We will study the court’s order and the magistrate’s recommendations,” a White House spokesman, Blair Jones, said. “We will continue preserving the tapes in compliance with the court’s order.”
The order was issued in response to lawsuits brought by a liberal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and by a private organization that collects historical government records, the National Security Archive. Both groups alleged that the White House had failed to meet its obligations to preserve official records.
“Judge Kennedy’s order demonstrates how concerned he is about the White House’s cavalier attitude to its records,” a lawyer for the National Security Archive, Meredith Fuchs, said. “Our hope, along with Crew, is to force the White House to restore the missing e-mails and then archive them properly so that they can be preserved for continuity of government and for the historical record.”
Ms. Fuchs said her group plans to use the legal process to determine whether some back-up tapes were destroyed or erased before the lawsuits were filed.
In April, Crew estimated, based in part on confidential sources, that the White House e-mail system had failed to archive 5 million e-mails. White House aides did not dispute those estimates but said they could not confirm them either.
President Clinton’s White House suffered similar archiving failures that caused the loss of a large volume of official e-mails. Restoring the Clinton-era e-mails from backup tapes was estimated to cost about $15 million, according to a 2001 report from the Government Accountability Office.