WASHINGTON — A federal court tore into the Bush White House on Thursday over the issue of millions of apparently missing e-mails, saying the administration failed in its obligation to safeguard all electronic messages.
In a four-page opinion, Magistrate Judge John Facciola said the White House is ignoring the court’s instructions to search a full range of locations for all electronic messages that might be missing.
The Executive Office of the President, or EOP, the magistrate said, is limiting its search to offices subject to the requirements of the Federal Records Act, while sidestepping offices subject to the preservation requirements of the Presidential Records Act.
There is a profound societal interest as well as a legal obligation to preserve all records and “the importance of preserving the e-mails cannot be exaggerated,” Facciola wrote.
The Bush White House has represented to the court that no records created in an office covered by the Presidential Records Act are transmitted to offices covered by the Federal Records Act.
But there is no factual record on which to base that conclusion, Facciola said.
He ordered the EOP to conduct a search of all offices regardless of which law covers a White House office, saying the issues in the case must be dealt with in “true emergency conditions” because there are just two business days remaining before the Bush administration ends.
Facciola’s opinion raises questions about the completeness of the Bush administration e-mail search. The Justice Department says the government has finished a search that entailed spending more than $10 million to find 14 million e-mails.
Facciola’s opinion is the third time in two days that a federal court has taken the Bush White House to task for its handling of missing e-mail, a problem first disclosed three years ago by the federal prosecutor investigating the administration’s leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity.
