The White House lost a court battle Friday in its attempt to keep secret visitor logs containing the identities of fundamentalist Christian leaders who are said to have visited the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s home.

Additionally, in a 24-page opinion issued Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth determined that the Secret Service violated the Federal Records Act by illegally deleting computer records dating back to 2001. The Secret Service deleted the records on orders from the White House and did not retain back up copies.

Judge Lamberth also found that Adrienne Thomas, Acting Archivist of the United States, had violated his legal obligation to ask the attorney general to undertake legal action to recover the deleted records. Lamberth ordered Thomas to request that the attorney general initiate legal action to recover the records and provide Congress a report of the progress.

The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Department of Homeland Security in 2006 for access to the records after the Secret Service-on orders from Cheney-refused to process CREW’s Freedom of Information Act request. The Secret Service was formerly operated by the Treasury Department. It became part of the Homeland Security Department in March 2003.

The White House assumed control of the visitor logs in 2006 when CREW and other watchdog groups and the media sought access to the files during the height of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and declared that they were privileged communications. Shortly thereafter, Cheney’s office instructed the Secret Service that visitor logs for his residence were the property of the Office of the Vice President.

But Lamberth rejected arguments that the records were prvileged and Friday’s order said the Secret Service must process CREW’s FOIA request and turn over the visitor logs.

“CREW’s victory today reaffirms the public’s right to know what the government is doing,” said Anne Weismann, CREW’s chief counsel. “We are pleased that the judicial branch has ripped the cloak of secrecy away from the White House and we hope the incoming administration takes heed of the court’s decision and ensures Secret Service records are available to the public.”

The nine fundamentalist Christian leaders allegedly identified in the Secret Service visitor logs are Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Gary L. Bauer, of American Values, Wendy Wright, of Concerned Women for America, Louis P. Sheldon and Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage and the Free Congress Foundation, Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, Donald Wildmon, of the American Family Association, and Jerry Falwell.

The Christian leaders provided the Bush administration with advice on policies such as stem cell research, abortion, and science. 

Lamberth had initially ruled in favor of CREW in December 2006 when the organization sued two month earlier for access to the visitor records. But the Bush administration appealed the decision last year arguing that a Supreme Court ruling issued in 2004 “warning that courts should hesitate before requiring the President or Vice President to “bear the burden” of “asserting specific claims of privilege and making . . . particular objections.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the Bush administration’s claims that Secret Service visitor logs are the property of President George W. Bush and are not subject to FOIA requests.  The panel of three appeals court judges essentially upheld Lamberth’s decision who ruled that the visitor logs were public documents subject to the FOIA.

Moreover, the appeals court rejected the White House’s argument that requiring the government to process the request and invoke exemptions would place a constitutionally impermissible burden on the president or vice president. The court determined that CREW’s request is “narrowly drawn” and that requiring the administration to rely on the FOIA’s exemptions to protect claims of executive privilege “is a routine occurrence, not a uniquely intrusive burden.”

Separately, CREW has been locked in a legal battle with the Bush administration over millions of missing White House e-mails.

In October of 2005, the Office of Administration discovered that White House e-mails had not been archived in accordance with the Presidential Records Act. An internal investigation by officials in the Office of Administration concluded that e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney between Sept. 30, 2003, and Oct. 6, 2003 were lost and unrecoverable.

That was the week when the Justice Department launched an investigation into the Plame leak and set a deadline for Bush administration officials to turn over documents and e-mails containing any reference to Plame Wilson or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The timeframe also coincided with litigation surrounding the release of documentsr related to Cheney’s National Energy Task Force meetings.

Additionally, Office of Administration staffers said there were at least 400 other days between March 2003 and October 2005 when e-mails could not be located in either Cheney’s office or the Executive Office of the President.

White House Chief Information Officer Teresa Payton and press secretary Dana Perino have blamed the loss of the e-mails on the administration’s transition from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.

Last year, Payton filed an affidavit with U.S. Magistrate John Facciaola stating that every three years the White House destroyed its hard drives “in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance.”

“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 physical destruction in accordance with Department of Defense guidelines,” states Payton’s sworn affidavit.

Last March, Payton also revealed that until October 2003 the White House had “recycled” its computer back-up tapes, which made it much more difficult to retrieve e-mails.

David Gewirtz, an expert on e-mail, and the author of the book Where Have All the Emails Gone? recently published an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama in the magazine Outlook Power advising him to treat White House computers “like crime scene evidence.”

“The crime is an admitted violation of the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act by your predecessor’s geek squad,” Gewirtz wrote in his letter to Obama. “When you walk through those imposing doors for the first time, the building is likely to be filled with the droppings and detritus of the previous administration, including old computers. Obviously, most of those computers are likely to have been carted away by exiting Bushies (just like President George H.W. Bush’s team did on January 19th, 1993), but there might be some still sitting around, and those could contain important information.

“What must happen is this: each computer your team finds in the White House and the [Executive Office of the President] must be treated as evidence. Each machine must be cataloged and then removed for forensic examination. Under no circumstances should anyone on your team boot up any of those machines or use them.

“This is critically important and you’re going to have only one shot. If you use those machines, you might overwrite deleted files that could otherwise be recovered. You could possibly cover the few remaining tracks that might be available, the few possible clues to a period of real upheaval in our history.”