The judge noted that Clinton turned over approximately 55,000 pages of messages to the State Department at its request last December and that the agency took steps to secure electronic copies of the records. Those copies now appear to be in the possession of the FBI. State has asked the FBI to preserve those electronic files.

Those and other steps are good enough, the judge said.

“These are hardly the actions of a recalcitrant agency head or an uncooperative Archivist. Rather, they reflect a sustained effort on the part of State and NARA, after the agencies had learned of the potential removal of federal records from the government’s possession, to recover and preserve all of those records” Boasberg wrote. “Taken together, all of the recovery efforts initiated by both agencies up to the present day cannot in any way be described as a dereliction of duty. In light of this, Plaintiffs cannot establish an ongoing injury actionable under the [Federal Records Act]; as such, their cases are moot.”

The State Department has faced a fusillade of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking Clinton’s emails, but there are legal hurdles to using those cases to challenge the legality of Clinton’s decision to keep her work-related emails in a personal account and not turn them over promptly when leaving government. The conservative groups who brought the Federal Records Act suits, Judicial Watch and Cause of Action, described the pair of cases as a means to obtain a legal ruling on whether Clinton broke the law and to try to force more aggressive efforts to recover Clinton’s messages.

The groups had asked the judge to order the Archives to sue Clinton to get the records back. However, Boasberg said agencies are not required to take that step in every instance in which federal records may have been put beyond the government’s reach.

The plaintiffs “cannot sue to force the recovery of records that they hope or imagine might exist. And, to the extent that Plaintiffs have identified emails not currently in State’s possession that they believe fit this description, they have not demonstrated that the agency and the Archivist have not taken any steps to recover them,” the judge said.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said his organization believes the archivist is required to ask the Justice Department to sue Clinton in circumstances such as these.

“The plain language does not give the agency discretion,” Fitton said in an interview. “They’re required to ask the attorney general to initiate legal action and they have not done that. There’s no way around that law. The court’s decision doesn’t appropriately address that. ... Sending letters to Secretary Clinton doesn’t count. So,the court got it wrong in our view.”

The groups can appeal the decision to the D.C. Circuit. Fitton said his group is considering its options.

A spokesman for Clinton’s presidential campaign also had no immediate comment on the ruling.

Boasberg is an appointee of President Barack Obama.

UPDATE (Monday, 4:01 p.m.): This post has been updated with Fitton’s comment and additional detail on Boasberg.