22m lost George Bush emails found

Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House emails from the administration of US President George W Bush.

The Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost email from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.

The two private groups - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive - said on Monday they were settling the lawsuits they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.

It will be years before the public sees any of the recovered emails because they will now go through the National Archives' process for releasing presidential and agency records. Presidential records of the Bush administration won't be available until 2014 at the earliest.

The tally of missing emails, the additional searches and the settlement are the latest development in a political controversy that stemmed from the Bush White House's failure to install a properly working electronic record keeping system. Two federal laws require the White House to preserve its records.

The two private organisations say there is not yet a final count on the extent of missing White House email and there may never be a complete tally.

Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said "many poor choices were made during the Bush administration and there was little concern about the availability of email records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records."

"We may never discover the full story of what happened here," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "It seems like they just didn't want the emails preserved."

Sloan said the latest count of misplaced emails "gives us confirmation that the Bush administration lied when they said no emails were missing."

The two groups say the 22 million White House emails were previously mislabeled and effectively lost.

The government now can find and search 22 million more emails than it could in late 2005 and the settlement means that the Obama administration will restore 94 calendar days of email from backup tape, said Kristen Lejnieks, an attorney representing the National Security Archive.

Sheila Shadmand, another lawyer representing the National Security Archive, said the Obama administration is making a strong effort to clean up "the electronic data mess left behind by the prior administration."

Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president's first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems, which didn't become publicly known until 2006, when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed them during his criminal investigation of the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

A Microsoft document on the Bush White House's e-mail problems states that Microsoft was called in to help find electronic messages in October 2003, more than two years before the problem surfaced publicly.

October 2003 was the month that the Justice Department began gearing up its criminal investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked the identity of Plame, the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph Wilson.

- Reuters