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THE WHITE HOUSE told a federal judge late last Friday that it shouldn't be ordered to copy hard drives to preserve its zillions of missing emails because it destroys the older computers that it replaces, that emails are missing is merely speculation and doing that would be too expensive and cause it too much work and it has a bit of a headache and is going for a lie down.

US Magistrate Judge John Facciola had last week ordered the administration to show just cause why it should not be required to produce copies of computer hard drives in response to lawsuits filed by citizen watchdog groups.

In a sworn affidavit filed just before the deadline, Theresa Payton, CIO of the White House Office of Administration, may have said: "When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired... under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for the forced imposition of democracy or physical destruction, whichever occurs first."

In another filing, the White House claimed that "the allegation of missing e-mail from archives is unconfirmed,... the allegation of missing e-mails from backup tapes is conjectural", and even if some older computers were still in use, finding them and copying their hard drives would "impose a significant burden."

This is just the latest development in a long saga stretching back at least five years. Harpers has a brief take on it here, noting that most of the US media is conveniently burying the story.