Funny how those emails seemed to turn up just at the right time.
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files.
Civil division trial lawyer Helen H. Hong made the disclosure at a court hearing provoked by a 2007 lawsuit filed by outside groups to ensure that politically significant records created by the White House are not destroyed or removed before President Bush leaves office at noon on Tuesday. She said the department plans to argue in a court filing this week that the administration’s successful recent search renders the lawsuit moot.
Hong’s statement came hours after U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered employees of the president’s executive office — with just days to go before their departure — to undertake a comprehensive search of computer workstations, preserve portable hard drives and examine any e-mail archives created or retained from 2003 to 2005, the period in which e-mails appeared to be missing.
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