Millions of Bush White House e-mails recovered

Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost e-mail 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 (CREW) and the National Security Archive — said 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 e-mails 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 e-mails, 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 organizations say there is not yet a final count on the extent of missing White House e-mail and there may never be a complete tally.

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

Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, said: “We may never discover the full story of what happened here. It seems like they just didn’t want the e-mails preserved.”

Ms. Sloan said the latest count of misplaced e-mails “gives us confirmation that the Bush administration lied when they said no e-mails were missing.”

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

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 Corp. 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 Mrs. Plame, the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV.