Major development today in CREW's lawsuit against the White House Office of Administration in our case over the missing White House e-mails.

Today, Federal District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an order allowing CREW)to conduct limited discovery in the case of CREW v. Office of Administration (OA). The court order can be found here.

For all the non-lawyer types, in short, discovery is a key part of the pre-trial process where the parties provide relevant information (including documents) to each other. Because the Office of Administration claims to be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) -- despite responding to FOIA requests in the past -- CREW argued that discovery was necessary to determine whether the Office of Administration is indeed an agency as defined by federal law. Today, the court agreed with us. This ruling means that within the next 10 days, CREW and the White House will have to develop a "Joint Discovery Plan."

In our lawsuit, CREW is seeking documents that the Office of Administration prepared assessing the scope of the missing White House email problem and its proposed recovery plan.