For the last few months it has appeared that the federal courts would force the Bush White House to account for, and eventually turn over, the infamous "missing e-mails" from the period March 2003 to October 2005. Now the judicial tide has turned.

The electronic communications sent and received by White House staff lie at the heart of a pitched battle between the Bush administration and public-access groups over the archiving (or lack thereof) of electronic communications at the White House.

This week, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an opinion in a lawsuit called CREW v. Office of Administration, filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit legal watchdog group in D.C. The judge basically ruled that the White House Office of Administration doesn't have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of many thousands of e-mails transmitted during the run-up to and early phases of the war in Iraq. On technical grounds, Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the Office of Administration isn't a "federal agency" and thus not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Pointing out that the Office of Administration had been routinely processing FOIA requests for two decades up until last August, after CREW requested documents pertaining to the lost e-mails, CREW executive director Melanie Sloan said, "The Bush administration is using the legal system to prevent the American people from discovering the truth about the millions of missing White House e-mails."

Regardless of your political leanings on this contretemps, the White House e-mail scandal should be an insult to any self-respecting IT professional, says David Gewirtz, publisher of online tech publisher Zatz Publishing and the author of Where Have All the Emails Gone?, an investigation into the matter.

Noting that White House Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton has made a series of embarrassing public statements about digital record-keeping at the highest level of the U.S. government, Gewirtz wrote recently, "Not a single private-sector CIO would be allowed to get away with negligence on this massive scale."

It's also worth noting that Judge Kollar-Kotelly is neither a high-tech naif nor a knee-jerk conservative: three years ago she issued a sharp rebuke to Microsoft in an episode relating to the aftermath of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against the software giant.

The decision on Monday may represent the end of CREW's efforts to uncover the digital trail of documents relating to the missing e-mails under FOIA -- but separate legal attempts to recover the missing messages themselves continue.