I'm sick and woozy, so I will not be able to check the comments (if any) very often. My apologies.
Let's talk a little about backups.
For a long time, e-mail was untrustworthy as storage, since the available space you had was limited. This was what you call "a situation guaranteed not to last." As more and more communication began to take place over e-mail, more and more legally significant communication especially, it became imperative to maintain a record of it. An example:
Say you're an organization advocating penguin lust (okay, so I liked Bloom County and love silly examples). Penguin lust is a controversial topic, producing strong negative reactions in The Heartland, and you're One of the things you do is take out advertisements in the media on this topic. In that vein, let's say that on Friday you buy a full-page ad in the New York Times that talks about how natural and family-oriented penguin lust is, to be printed the following Tuesday. Let's also say Bluto and Bernice (two penguins, of course) get caught doing the wild thing on the altar at the National Cathedral Saturday night (they were bored), which just might undercut your ad a little - so you fire off phone calls and e-mails telling the NYT to cancel the buy, and get an e-mail response acknowledging and confirming that the buy will not go through. Tuesday rolls around, and the ad is printed, and you're not going to get any of your money back! "What the hell," you say. Guess what! If you want to give in to your urge to sue the hell out of them, your best piece of evidence is that little e-mail response you got acknowledging your instruction to cancel the buy.
This sort of thing happens more often than you might think.
Now let's look at backups: Most places change tapes once a week, rotating every set except for one full backup set each month - which gets shipped off-site for long-term storage. One of the reasons they do this is so they can, if someone tries a lawsuit like the one above, produce documentation that can be produced in defense (there are a million and one reasons to do backups, and only two reasons not to: you're doing something that has literally no legal or economic value, and two you're doing something you don't want to get caught at, whether it be criminal or otherwise. So either the GOP is lying about not having backup tapes, it's a criminal organization, it's an unethical organization, or it's a fundamentally worthless organization. There are arguments in support of each of the last three positions, but they all have one weakness, which we'll look at via addressing the consequences that would exist if the excuse that the backup tapes were wiped in rotation is true.
If they really don't have long-term backups, and they say how often their tapes are rotated, then any e-mail they produce in court from a time period which is longer that that is suspect.
Say they rotate backup tapes so that a tape gets overwritten after two months (if they're stupid, all they do is overwrite the same backup tapes over and over and over again, let's give them a touch of credit).
If an email is produced from one year ago, and say the person whose account it was stopped working for the GOP six months ago (people change jobs in Washington like the rest of the country changes underwear), then the defense in that case has an excellent chance of knocking holes in the reliability of that evidence. In short, by making it "impossible" to use any of their e-mail records against them, they have substantially degraded the ability of such evidence to be used in their defense in the future - and possibly, if there are smart IT-savvy lawyers out there, forced the re-examination of past cases they won in which e-mail evidence was a factor.
It would be a good idea for anyone familiar with the GOP's litigation history to start rattling cages or perhaps push a motion to appeal civil/contract cases that turned on e-mail evidence - when the judgments threaten to become financially onerous, I bet they'll find their backup tapes.