Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush ... 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 22 million e-mails "would never have been found but for our lawsuits and pressure from Capitol Hill," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW. "It was only then that they did this reanalysis and found as a result that there were 22 million e-mails that they were unable to account for before." "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 e-mails preserved." 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."
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