[White House Chief Information Officer Theresa]Payton said that since the watchdog groups' claims are unsupported the White House should not be forced to undertake a "draconian" process of having to search for emails.

Gawd I hate this administration.

Has anyone told not Payton that these communications are the public's archives? That the White House isn't a private little castle for President Stompy and his slobbering coterie of ass=kissing sycophants and courtiers?

And that this "draconian" measure she's complaining about is to basically follow the rules in place since declaring independence from actual royal fiat?

This is how disgusting the Bush administration is. They've even gone beyond being contemptuous when asked merely to follow rule of law, when the "slightest whiff of impropriety" has been the low bar for every other administration in history.

Nixon resigned for less.

"Because the allegation of missing e-mail from archives is unconfirmed, because the allegation of missing e-mails from back-up tapes is conjectural, and because the computer workstations are unlikely to house significant, if any, relevant material the costs of a forensic copy process would far outweigh any speculative benefits."

The allegations are unconfirmed only because the White House has refused to do a thorough investigation, including data recovery from back-up tapes or servers.  Or, to put it more succinctly:

"There is no evidence we did anything wrong because all the evidence is missing."  

Even in cases where the loss of electronic data is "inadvertent" or "negligent," judges today get very pissed off when presented with such excuses, especially when they are coupled with "it's too expensive to search the back-up tapes or the servers."  Especially when the party resisting disclosure has a statutory or regulatory obligation to preserve such data (as most financial institutions, especially broker-dealers, do).

As I understand the Judge Facciola's order, the White House has been ordered to create a copy of all electronic e-mails it currently has. Where there has been significant spoliation of evidence -- as there clearly has been here -- such orders are routine.  However, the purpose of such an order is to prevent further loss of evidence. It's no more than evidence preservation.  The question of evidence retrieval -- restoring copies of e-mails where the original hard drives are missing or destroyed -- is a separate, albeit very important, project.  It sounds like the White House is conflating these two distinct tasks.

Congress needs to march a subpoena over and physically seize some machines.

The Exec should be required to make a sound, legal argument apart from VP Sneer saying, "So?"

I really, really want a Democrat in the White House in November.  I really, really would like to see John Edwards become AG.