The BP and White House oil spill rate scandal is still going strong...

BP Plc (BP/), trying to counter claims that the company underestimated the size of last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, lost its bid for a court order directing the Obama administration to turn over e-mails from four officials.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan in New Orleans, who is handling evidence rulings in lawsuits over the spill, refused to order the U.S. to produce e-mails from officials including Carol Browner, former assistant to the president for energy and climate change. BP said the officials were involved in the government’s post-spill response including estimates of the flow of oil from the doomed well.

“BP has not made a sufficient demonstration of need for the documents,” Shushan said in a one-page ruling today, denying the request. BP can renew its bid for the e-mails if documents produced in the future “demonstrate a need for discovery,” or additional evidence, from the White House, she said.

The April 2010 Macondo well blowout and the explosion that followed killed 11 workers. The accident and spill led to hundreds of lawsuits against BP and its partners and contractors, including a suit brought by the U.S. under federal pollution laws.

Most of the lawsuits are combined before U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans. BP’s letter, sent July 7, was filed in the court docket today.

BP argued that the e-mails were essential because the government “has alleged that BP may be liable for billions of dollars of penalties premised on the volume of discharged oil.”

‘Falsified Estimates’

“Other litigants have alleged that BP misstated or falsified estimates of the rate at which the oil was flowing from the Macondo well,” BP said in the letter.

Evidence on the oil spill size is “especially important to BP’s defense of the many claims in this MDL that assert that BP improperly falsified estimates of how fast the oil was flowing, while it was still flowing,” the company said in the letter.

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