Well, of course they do! You didn't think they were going to start following the laws at this late date, did you?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is aggressively pushing back against a federal court order instructing the most important offices in the White House to preserve all of their e-mail.

In court papers late Friday, the administration argued that a federal court has no authority to impose such a requirement on the offices of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Council.

[...] The issue arose Wednesday after U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the White House to issue a notice to all employees to surrender any e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005.

[...] In the lawsuits over possibly missing e-mails that may number in the millions, two private groups are seeking to force the White House to engage in a recovery effort and to establish an electronic archive for e-mail.

The White House said this week that it had located 14 million e-mails thought to have been missing. But the White House has provided no details to support this assertion.

The two private groups suing the Executive Office of the President are the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Following up on an item from yesterday, the White House officially made a ridiculous argument about officials' missing emails.

The White House is currently under fire for allegations that it violated the Presidential Records Act by failing to archive official e-mails. Facing a court order, the White House yesterday acknowledged that it recycled its “backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003,” raising the possibility that many messages “have been taped over and are gone forever.”

Yet when asked about the missing e-mails in today’s White House press briefing, spokesman Tony Fratto inexplicably tried to claim that the White House has “absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing.” He argued that these scurrilous charges of missing e-mails “came from outside the White House.”

Fortunately, we have Henry Waxman to set the record straight.

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Did Fratto not realize he'd be called on such a blatant falsehood? Or does the Bush White House simply no longer care?

We learned earlier this year that most of the Bush White House’s senior staff, in blatant violation of the Presidential Records Act, sidestepped an internal email system, preferring to use private accounts provided by the Republican National Committee. Those thousands of emails, which included government business, are still missing after having been “accidentally” deleted.

As it turns out, that’s only one of two serious problems the Bush gang has in maintaining their electronic records. In an entirely different set of missing emails, however, we’re seeing quite a bit of movement this week. Dan Froomkin explains:

Why is it taking White House officials so long to restore millions of deleted e-mails from the backup tapes they claim to have?

The e-mails in question date from March 2003 to October 2005 — a crucial period that includes the Iraq invasion, a presidential election and Hurricane Katrina.

White House officials have known for more than two years that the messages were deleted — a clear violation of presidential records-preservation statutes. But the president’s aides won’t explain what happened, what sort of backups they have and what they’re doing about it.

When Congress asked about the 5 million missing emails, a White House lawyer suggested an outside IT contractor was responsible. The response appeared almost humorous, given that no such IT contractor exists.

Yesterday, in response to a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a federal judge disappointed the Bush gang terribly with a major court order.

Via The Raw Story:

As if it wasn't bad enough for the Bush Administration already, contempt charges are flying in Montana.The Administration's top forestry official has been ordered to explain why the US Forest Service failed to analyze the environmental impact of dropping a fish-killing flame retardant on wildfires -- or face contempt of court.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey would then face jail unless the Forest Service assented to a court order enjoining the environmental review.

"Noting that Rey had blocked implementation of an earlier review, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Malloy ordered Rey to appear in his court Oct. 15 unless the Forest Service completes the analysis before that time," Associated Press reporter Jeff Barnard wrote.

Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh told AP the agency was working on the analysis, but couldn't say if the Secretary would meet the deadline; Rey did not respond to requests for comment. Read more...

Brian Ross has the scoop at ABC.

The Blotter:

The FBI repeatedly failed to follow the strict guidelines of the Patriot Act when its agents took advantage of a new provision allowing the FBI to obtain phone and financial records without a court order, according to a report to be made public Friday by the Justice Department's Inspector General.

The report, in classified and unclassified versions, remains closely held, but Washington officials who have seen it tell ABC News it documents "numerous lapses" and describe it as "scathing" and "not a pretty picture for the FBI."

FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to brief Congress on the report at noon.

The officials say the inspector general found the FBI underreported by at least 20 percent the use of the controversial provision, known as National Security Letters, NSLs, in required disclosures to Congress. Read more...

Lest we forget President Bush issued one of those infamous signing statements back in February 2006 when he signed the Patriot Act reauthorization, effectively nullifying the provisions Congress agreed upon so that these kinds of abuses wouldn't occur. Will that be their legal defense? I think so.

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

Washington Post has more...

On "THIS WEEK," Sen. Feingold told George Stephanopolous that he wants the Senate to admonish Bush for approving domestic wiretaps on American citizens without first seeking a legally required court order.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT MP3- Download | play -MP3 (David Edwards)

Stephanopoulos: Tomorrow in the Senate you'll introduce a resolution to censure George W. Bush. Let me show it to our viewers. It says, "Resolved: that the United States Senate does hereby censure George W. Bush, President of the United States, and does condemn his unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans." That is a big step-Why are you taking it now?

Feingold: It's an unusual step. It's a big step, but what the President did by consciously and intentionally violating the constitutional laws of this country with this illegal wiretapping has to be answered. There can be debate about whether the law should be changed. There can be debate about how best to fight terrorism. We all believe that there should be wiretapping in appropriate cases. But the idea that the president can just make up a law in violation of his oath of office has to be answered.

ABC News says:

"This conduct is right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors," said Feingold, D-Wis., a three-term senator and potential presidential contender.

He said President Bush had, "openly and almost thumbing his nose at the American people," continued the NSA domestic wiretap program. President Bush has long asserted that the so-called 'warrantless wiretaps' are an essential tool in the war on terror.

UPDATE: Raw Story has the full transcript posted now.

I'm no lawyer, but my friend David thought this sounded odd. Sessions was answering a question about the NSA wiretapping that Bush is involved in and said:

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT (David Edwards)

Sessions: When you authorize the military to use force, they can kill the enemy without a Miranda warning. They can put them in jail without a trial- and be able to intercept their communications is legitimate.

I don't know how that addresses the question of the NSA wiretapping.

Jeralyn writes:

"A problem is with Sessions analogy is that the NSA warrantless wiretap flap is not about spying on the enemy, but spying on ordinary Americans without a required court order....read on

Reddhedd:

Well, that may be true on the battlefield -- but what about on the streets of the United States?
When we throw out due process of law, can we continue to call ourselves a beacon of liberty and democracy? Or are we just another two-bit dictatorship? Should we re-animate Stalin now, or what?...read on