DOJ wins a legal battle with DNC over White House e-mails

A federal judge has handed the White House a legal victory in a battle with the Democratic National Committee over e-mails related to U.S. attorney firings.

District Judge Ellen Huvelle of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Thursday that the DNC does not have a right under the Freedom of Information Act to 68 pages of e-mails sent between White House and Justice Department officials simply because the White House e-mail traffic was transmitted on a server controlled by the Republican National Committee.

The DNC sued the Justice Department in April 2007 after its FOIA request for the e-mails, which relate to the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, was not granted by DOJ. Attorneys for the DNC argued that since the White House officials used "GWB43.com" e-mail addresses to send the messages, they cannot be deemed to be official in nature and therefore must be turned over under the DNC's FOIA request. Eighty-eight White House officials were given those RNC-controlled addresses to conduct political activities, but the Bush administration later claimed that the accounts were used to handle other official business, such as interactions between the White House and senior DOJ aides on the prosecutor purge.

In dismissing the DNC lawsuit, Huvelle ruled that it was "based on the false factual premise that White House officials only used their RNC e-mail accounts for political communications."

Additionally, Huvelle decided that just because an RNC server was used to send the messages — 68 pages out of more than 5,000 which have been denied to the DNC — it is not enough to automatically disqualify the Justice Department from claiming a FOIA exemption in refusing to release them.

"It is therefore clear that RNC e-mail accounts were used (rightly or wrongly) both for official and RNC business, and thus the nature of the server is not necessarily informative as to whether the document contained official or political communications," Huvelle wrote in her opinion.

The DNC's attorneys also argued that since the RNC evidently did not retain huge numbers of White House e-mails, this was a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires that all official White House records and documents be saved. Since the White House didn't make an effort to archive the e-mails on the RNC servers, they cannot be considered as official White House business and be exempted from FOIA requests.

But Huvelle noted she wasn't asked to rule on whether the White House violated the Presidential Records Act, only whether the e-mails were exempted from FOIA requests because of their content. Huvelle, in fact, said the failure to save the e-mails from the White House officials was "an apparently flagrant violation" of the Presidential Records Act.

Yet that wasn't enough for Huvelle to order the Justice Department to turn over the requested e-mails to the DNC, even though it may open up another avenue of investigation for congressional Democrats looking into the millions of missing White House e-mails.

"However, the administration’s violation of the Presidential Records Act is, as plaintiff acknowledges ... not before this Court, and it cannot serve as a basis for determining whether the government has properly invoked" a FOIA exemption, Huvelle wrote. "Moreover, [the DNC] fails to point to any case law that would indicate that the server where an e-mail is housed is relevant to its treatment under FOIA. Rather, under D.C. Circuit precedent, it is the content, not the form, of the communication that determines whether it is properly exempt" from FOIA.

Huvelle added: "Therefore, because the form of the document does not factor into the analysis under FOIA, the Court cannot adopt a per se rule that any e-mails sent on the RNC servers are not covered by FOIA."