The White House response
The White House, as you might imagine, is not thrilled with this request. Before you get all political, let's remember that no IT operation, anywhere on the planet, huge enterprise or tiny developer -- no one -- would want to comply with a request like this. This is a heck of a lot of work and IT people are always, without exception, overburdened every single day.

So, it's understandable, from a strictly IT-person perspective, that the White House CIO would do her best to avoid the project.

On the other hand, most IT people in large shops are subject to certain Federal record-keeping requirements and, if so ordered by a court, would have to do a project like this, whether they liked it or not. Likewise, Theresa Payton's office is subject to both the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act. Whether or not she wants to or can or can't spare the time, if the court orders this project be done, she's going to have to do it -- or fight back with yet another lawyerly response.

So let's look at her claims one-by-one.

The PCs don't exist anymore
Her first claim is that most of the PCs from that time simply don't exist anymore:

As an initial matter, computer workstations used by EOP Federal Records Act (FRA) component employees during the relevant time period covering March 2003 to October 2005 are unlikely to be in use today

Subject to, among other things, budgetary considerations and customer scheduling conflicts, it has been OA's goal to conduct an IT "refresh" program to replace up to one-third of EOP workstations each year. The replacement is necessary in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance.

Bottom line: There are no PCs at the White House older than three years.

Old drives are destroyed
Next, she states that the old drives are destroyed:

When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired from the EOP Network 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.

One element missing from this discussion is what the other "government entity" is and the status of each of those drives.

Bottom line: Old hard drives were destroyed somewhere, but the White House doesn't say where.

Surely there were manifests, bills of lading, or records for the destroyed drives.

A new security risk surfaces
Buried in a footnote in CIO Payton's response was a very disturbing statement:

The Court's Order also mentions hardware other than workstations (e.g. "hard or external drives, CDs, DVDs, jump, zip, hard, or floppy disks"). OCIO does not have a formal process to provide such media to its customers or users, nor does it have any process in place for tracking or monitoring the use of such media. This is left to the discretion of the user and the components to track and manage.