Bush gone, but e-mail problems linger.

• Position: GOVERNMENT RECORDS

Less than a week before the Obama administration moved into the White House, the Bush administration was ordered to turn over any electronic devices that may contain e-mails from between March 2003 and October 2005, a period from which millions of the executive office's e-mails are 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, turn over any electronic media storage devices, and to preserve any e-mails from the period in question, according to The Washington Post.

The order was requested by 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-marls in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). A similar suit filed by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) was consolidated with the Archive's suit.

National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton explained the reason for the order 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."

Only hours after the emergency court order was filed, the Justice Department told a federal judge at a separate hearing that the White House has located at least 14 million of the missing e-mails that have been the subject of several lawsuits and congressional inquiries.

Justice Department attorney Helen Hong told the court that the White House spent $10 million to locate the e-mails, which were found by independent contractors as they searched through 60,000 disaster backup tapes. She said the e-mails would be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration, along with 300 million other documents in accordance with the PRA, immediately after Bush left office.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a court filing that sought the dismissal of the lawsuit, the Justice Department maintained that the 14 million e-mails were never actually "missing," rather they were simply unaccounted for due to a "flawed and limited" internal review by the Office of Administration in 2005...