CREW and the National Security Archive won the first part of their fight with the White House–getting a court order requiring the White House to preserve their emails and the back-ups (h/t PJ Evans).
A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies ofall its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had arguedstrongly against.
U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of thePresident to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits thatseek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails inviolation of federal law.
The White House is seekingdismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups — Citizens forResponsibility and Ethics in Government and the National SecurityArchive.
This is just the first part of the battle, of course. The White House will surely invoke some kind of expansive privilege to avoid telling us taxpayers whether it destroyed emails, why, and how. But for now, they’re forced to contend with an order that they keep the emails.
Wonder what will happen if we discover they’ve destroyed these, too?
Which is effectively what’s been happening with Matt Blunt in MO. Via the Pope, Blunt has been definitively busted pretending not to know he shouldn’t delete emails all the while he was deleting them.
A former staff attorney for Gov. Matt Blunt sentan internal office memo challenging his boss’s stance on deletinge-mails just weeks before the attorney was fired, according to a copyof the memo obtained by The Associated Press.
Thememo’s existence and content contradict public statements made by Bluntand his top officials after the attorney was fired in late September.Blunt officials have repeatedly said Scott Eckersley never challenged -verbally or in writing – their policy of deleting office e-mail andbrought up the issue only the day he was fired.
Thememo also offers the strongest support yet for Eckersley’s claim thathe did advise Blunt’s office about his e-mail retention policy, forwhich he says he was fired. Blunt has said the 30-year-old deputy legalcounsel was fired because of shoddy performance and conducting personalbusiness at work.
Gosh, you think there’s a connection between all these GOPers and their disappearing emails?