Judge urges WH to preserve all e-mails.

A “U.S. magistrate on Friday rejected arguments by the Bush administration and urged a federal judge to order the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails.” AP reports:

U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola said it is necessary to hold out the threat of a contempt of court citation to ensure that White House personnel safeguard backup tapes of electronic messages that may have been deleted. [...]

Facciola’s report to the judge stems from a controversy dating back nearly two years over missing White House e-mails. An ethics advocacy group says the White House has deleted millions of e-mails and the private organization is suing the Executive Office of the President in an attempt to force the government to reconstruct any lost messages from backup tapes.

The nonpartisan watchdog group CREW “sought this order to ensure that back-up copies of the millions of email deleted from White House servers between March 2003 and October 2005 were preserved pending resolution of CREW’s lawsuit.”