White House ordered to search media devices

With less than a week left before the Obama administration moves in, the Bush White House was ordered Wednesday to turn over any devices that may contain e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005, a period from which millions of the executive office's e-mails appear to be missing.

In an emergency court order, Judge Henry Kennedy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia directed the Executive Office of the President to search staff workstations and personal storage table files, and to preserve any e-mails from the period in question.

The court order also directed the office's employees to surrender any media devices in their possession, such as CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, or external hard drives, that may contain e-mails from that period, so they can be searched.

The emergency court order came at the behest of the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute that filed a lawsuit in September 2007 to compel the White House to retrieve and preserve its e-mails. A similar suit filed by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington was consolidated with the Archive's suit.

"There is nothing like a deadline to clarify the issues," National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton said in a statement. "In six days, the Bush Executive Office of the President will be gone, and without this order, their records may disappear with them."

At a separate hearing Wednesday, the Justice Department told a federal judge that the White House has already located at least 14 million missing e-mails, The Washington Post reported.

[inachu]

All information linking certain people were already removed from the National security Archive by people already reported on in the news so that history will not be able to link certain people to certain events. Pretty sad day. But aipac members are happy about this.

[Lerianis]

They won't when their ***** are sitting in prison. When Obama gets into office, he should start kicking ass and taking names, and REFUSE to sign any 'Waivers of Culpability" for Mr. Bush and his cronies. Yes, MR. BUSH..... he isn't worthy of being called President or even EX-President.

[JPSaltzman]

The information is already erased. Gone. Vanished. It's been that way with the Bush Administration since Day 1, eight tragic years ago. Everything they did was secretive and in blatant defiance of Federal Law. Some people never got over Watergate and the laws that were passed as a result of that fiasco, and if any administration went out of their way to circumvent the laws, it was the Bush Administration, most specifically Dick Cheney and his office. He still brags about it today.

[swenk22]

No wait... everything is retrievable...... <br /><br />Just look in Sandy Bergers socks to find it...<br /><br />http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/20/berger.probe/

[globalist_agenda]

No more success than finding WMDs. Finding "lost" emails will be as successful as finding Sadam's WMDs or locating Bin Laden. The lost emails are sitting in a cave between the lawless borders of Afghan-Paki.

[Dalkorian]

That's the problem, the lost emails are NOT sitting in a cave anywhere. The ashes of them are sitting at the bottom of a fireplace would be more apt. They are gone - deliberately, purposely and in defiance of the law. Yet another crime to charge fuhrer bushit with. We have plenty of them now.

[ledhead1962]

Bush has said recently that history will judge his time in office. I have a judgement for him right now- evil, duplicitous, negligent, self serving, Nixonesque . Should the latest obstacle surprise? Hardly, this man and the cabal of lackeys will go down as the most corrupt government since the Byzantine empire. Were the Bush years about national karma? If so the American people should be paid up in full and hopefully have a chance to put the country back on course.

[Dalkorian]

HA - fart load of good this will do. All this will accomplish is to give fuhrer bushit another hare-brained idea to mock the world by pretending to search his office - like he did with the Iraqi WMD's he knew would never be found because they were an invention of his deranged mind. You know the routine already, peering under the notepad on this desk and proclaiming "nope, no lost emails here!"<br /><br />Yet another charge to tack onto this criminal. We have plenty, what we need is a trial! Impeachment would have been nice, but since America did not receive that JUSTICE we'll have to accept what we can get.<br /><br />ARREST BUSHIT AND EVERYONE IN HIS ADMINISTRATION AND SEND THEM TO THE HAGUE ON JANUARY 20th!

[cpopken]

Wow. So much hatred on here.