A federal court ruled last Friday that the Department of State was not required to enlist the assistance of the Attorney General to recover work-related emails exchanged by former Secretary of State Colin Powell on an AOL email account, because those emails were "technologically impossible" to recover. Plaintiff Cause of Action had sought Powell's AOL emails through two Freedom of Information Act requests in October 2016, after then-Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy testified about the agency's efforts to find the emails. But when Cause of Action's FOIA requests stalled, Cause of Action filed a suit seeking enforcement of a Federal Records Act provision requiring agencies to ask the Attorney General for help in securing lost federal records.