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Jan 15, 2009 There may be only a handful of days left in the Bush administration, but the brouhaha over White House e-mail retention policies promises to continue right up to the last day. A federal court yesterday extended a preservation order to ensure that the outgoing administration does everything it can to recover any missing White House e-mails. The White House IT staff now has five days to scour workstations for missing e-mail before administration data records are archived on Jan. 20. The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr., also orders staff of the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to relinquish any digital media that may contain e-mails from March 2003 and October 2005. The legal action is the latest resulting from a lawsuit filed in September 2007 by the National Security Archive against the EOP, seeking to preserve and restore White House e-mails it alleged were missing. "There is nothing like a deadline to clarify the issues," Tom Blanton, the National Security Archive's director, said in a statement. "The White House will complain about the last-minute challenge, but this is a records crisis of its own making." The Archive, an independent nongovernmental research institute based at George Washington University, is a repository of government records and does not receive U.S. government funding. The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a left-wing public advocacy group, also filed suit, but its legal action was subsequently consolidated with the Archive's legal action, which is taking place in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Last May, the White House's top tech staffer acknowledged that three months of data were missing from backup tapes. In earlier testimony before a congressional committee, White House technical staff said millions of e-mails from the past eight years could potentially have been erased. Also yesterday, Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola held an emergency status con