Blawgletter wonders whether Congress and the White House will use the new federal rules on electronic discovery as a guide in the controversy over the unofficial email accounts that some White House employees used over the last several years. 

One U.S. Senator doubted that emails no longer exist, stating:  “You can’t erase e-mails, not today.  They’ve gone through too many servers.”  (Story here.)

Blawgletter especially wants to know what people have done to preserve emails and other electronic documents.  Have they imaged the "permanent" memory of staffers’ computers and PDAs — a step necessary to recover documents that someone (or the computer itself) has "deleted"?  How about the servers through which emails traveled?

The general news reports don’t disclose the precise measures.  Blawgletter guesses they don’t because the media and government include so few knowledgeable lawyers these days and therefore haven’t a clue about e-discovery.

Barry Barnett

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