Judge Gives White House Three Days to Respond to E-Mail Proposal
Administration officials have three days to draft arguments opposing a federal magistrate’s suggestion that they should copy e-mails on the hard drives of executive office computers.
Magistrate Judge John Facciola issued an order to show cause (PDF) yesterday asking officials why they should not have to make a copy of all preservable data on the computers from March 2003 to October 2005, according to ABC News. But he rejected as too “draconian” a proposal by the plaintiffs that would have forced the quarantine of all computer workstations.
Facciola’s proposal would preserve e-mails that may be available on individual workstations but that are not present on the backup tapes that had been routinely recycled before 2003, according to a press release by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, one of the plaintiffs in the case.
A prior court order by Facciola in February forced White House officials to disclose the problems with the backup system, the Associated Press reports.
The Security Archive’s suit seeks to force the White House to restore and preserve the e-mail.
