A federal judge issued a rare order Tuesday requiring the Justice Department to secure emails that may be in the personal Gmail account of a top department official who's about to depart his post with the change in administration.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan instructed Justice to preserve any emails that Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter Kadzik has in private accounts that could be responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the conservative group Judicial Watch.

"Defendant shall take all necessary and reasonable steps to ensure the preservation of all agency records and potential agency records between the dates of December 1, 2014 and November 7, 2016 in any personal email account of Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter Kadzik. Any question about whether a record is an agency record shall be resolved in favor of it being an agency record," Sullivan wrote Tuesday afternoon.

The judge, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, also ordered Justice Department lawyers to report back by 9 a.m. Wednesday on the steps taken to preserve the records.

Portions of Judicial Watch's FOIA requests were broad, seeking all correspondence between Kadzik and representatives of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign over a period of nearly two years and all messages Kadzik handled on his Gmail account that involved official business during most of 2016.

However, in a court filing earlier Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers indicated that Kadzik had no such records—or, perhaps, that they didn't qualify as the kind of government "agency records" subject to FOIA.