significant update on CREW suit -- 10.25.07 -- efforts to obtain white house e-mails

[here's some background on CREW lawsuit.]

CREW has accelerated its efforts
to protect, from obliteration,
important presidential records,
required by applicable law to
be maintained by the white house.

we all now know the white house
has failed to comply with this law.

CREW seeks expedited discovery
because, apparently (huge surprise!),
the white house lawyers are not
returning calls promptly to set
up procedures for normal discovery.

given that we know -- from the white
house's failure to deny the below -- that
these are the last remaining copies of
all those missing emails, it is imperative
that they be copied out of the hands of
those who would have otherwise let them
vanish. i think the judge will agree.

from the filing, then:

. . .Specifically, CREW seeks to ascertain with more precision the universe of email records deleted from White House servers, the universe of still-existing back-up copies that could be used to restore the deleted records and to obtain documents created by defendant Office of Administration ("OA") when it discovered the missing emails, which would assist the Court in determining what needs to be preserved on an interim basis. All this discovery has one goal: preserving the records of this presidency for their rightful owner, the American people. . .

The factual background to the complaint includes the OA’s discovery in October 2005 that millions of email records covering a two and one-half year period were missing from White House servers where they had been dumped for archival storage, a discovery the White House has not denied. After analyzing the problem and determining the extent of the missing emails, the periods of time covered by the missing emails and the Executive Office of the President (“EOP”) components from which the missing emails originated, the OA developed a recovery plan that called for restoring the deleted emails from then-existing back-up tapes. The White House, however, never implemented this plan or any other; to date, the White House has failed to restore any of the deleted emails. As a result, the back-up copies created by the White House are the only repository for the deleted emails. . .

keep on keepin' on. . .