White House Ordered Not to Erase Discs : Transition: Judge is quoted as saying he thinks the Administration will defy the ruling and delete computer records anyway.

A federal judge Thursday forbade the erasing of electronic messages and other records on the hard discs of White House and National Security Council computers before President Bush leaves office.

U.S. District Judge Charles Richey rejected White House claims that preserving the millions of electronic mail, or E-mail, messages would “disrupt the orderly transition of power between the administrations of President Bush and President-elect Clinton.”

After a two-hour hearing, Richey refused to lift his order of last week directing the White House and the archivist of the United States to take steps to ensure that so-called non-presidential federal records on the computers and backup tapes are preserved.

“As a practical matter, one does not have to know much about computers to know that saving this information is not going to bring the government to its knees,” the judge said Thursday.

But the New York Times, in today’s editions, quoted Richey as saying court papers filed by the Bush Administration led him to believe that it would begin erasing the material today despite his rulings. In the papers, the government argued that the files should be erased to create computer space for the incoming Administration.

“This is just outrageous,” the newspaper quoted Richey as saying in what it described as an unsolicited telephone call to a reporter.

Immediately after Thursday’s ruling, the Administration filed an appeal of Richey’s orders, including the latest, with the U.S. Court of Appeals. No action by the appeals court was taken Thursday.

The case, brought in 1989 by the National Security Archive, a private research organization that collects declassified government documents, is the first to apply the 50-year-old Federal Records Act to computer records.

While many of the E-mail messages in the White House and National Security Council computers may be trivial, others not found on paper anywhere were instrumental in uncovering some of the events in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.

In papers filed with Richey’s court Tuesday, the Administration said Bush’s National Security Council staff had been given a Jan. 15 deadline to “write over user data at each work station on all personal computer systems in order to create clean user space for the incoming Administration’s staff members.”

It said Richey’s earlier order not only “threatens to deprive President Bush of important confidentiality protections,” but also “has burdened the incoming Clinton Administration with heavy new record-keeping requirements.”

“The courts and Congress have never said that the Federal Records Act applies to only one Administration,” the judge retorted in denying the Administration’s request for a stay of his earlier order.

Exempted from the judge’s orders are so-called presidential records--documents produced by Bush’s staff with the purpose of advising or assisting him. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in 1991 that courts have no authority over those strictly presidential records.

The Administration complained that Richey’s order “effectively has blocked President Bush from exercising his right” to separate his electronic presidential records from the others in the computer because they “are necessarily intermingled.”

The judge said he was not satisfied with the steps taken since his order last week to separate the two types of records and assure that all of the federal ones are preserved.

“The fact that the defendants may suffer harm or inconvenience, which has to be (minimal) at this stage . . . does not mean that the balance of equities favors a stay,” Richey said. “Allowing a stay . . . will only frustrate the cause of justice and delay access to the documentary history of the federal government . . . .”