22 million missing Bush White House e-mails found
By PETE YOST (AP) – 17 minutes ago

WASHINGTON — Two nonprofit groups say that computer technicians have found 22 million White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush.

The two groups say the electronic messages were previously mislabeled and effectively lost.

An announcement Monday by the two groups is the latest development in a controversy that surrounded the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic recordkeeping system
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and background article from 1/2009
Missing White House E-Mails Traced, Justice Aide Says


By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2009

A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files.

Civil division trial lawyer Helen H. Hong made the disclosure at a court hearing provoked by a 2007 lawsuit filed by outside groups to ensure that politically significant records created by the White House are not destroyed or removed before President Bush leaves office at noon on Tuesday. She said the department plans to argue in a court filing this week that the administration's successful recent search renders the lawsuit moot.

Hong's statement came hours after U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered employees of the president's executive office -- with just days to go before their departure -- to undertake a comprehensive search of computer workstations, preserve portable hard drives and examine any e-mail archives created or retained from 2003 to 2005, the period in which e-mails appeared to be missing.

Hong said private contractors had helped find the e-mails by searching through an estimated 60,000 tapes that contain daily recordings of the entire contents of the White House computers as a precaution against an electronic disaster.



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