22 Million Bush Administration E-Mails Recovered

Computer technicians have recovered 22 million e-mails missing from the Bush administration, according to two government transparency groups that filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President, the Huffington Post reports. The suits focused on the Bush administration's failure to install an electronic record-keeping system, and the Obama administration is now searching for more messages possibly lost during the Bush years.

The e-mails "would never have been found but for our lawsuits and pressure from Capitol Hill," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "It was only then that they did this re-analysis and found as a result that there were 22 million e-mails that they were unable to account for before."

Former Bush spokesman Scott Stanzel said that the messages had been recovered while Bush was still in office and that the liberal groups' claims were part of "a continued anti-Bush agenda." He said the groups had "consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues."

The e-mails will not be made public for some time. They will enter the National Archives' process for releasing presidential records, and records from the Bush administration will not be made public until 2014.