22M 'Missing' Bush-Era Emails Reappear

Data won't be public for years, but may shed light on Iraq, Plame
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 14, 2009 4:22 PM CST
22M 'Missing' Bush-Era Emails Reappear
In this Jan. 12, 2009 file photo, President George W. Bush speaks during a news conference in the pressroom at the White House in Washington.   (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)

Twenty-two million emails that the Bush administration had given up as lost have been found. Computer experts working for two advocacy groups that sued the executive branch in 2007 for not properly archiving its emails announced the messages were in fact mislabeled. The messages must be vetted before they can be made public, but when and if they're released, they may shed light on the run-up to the Iraq war and the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, Mother Jones reports.

The groups said it's not clear how much additional Bush-era correspondence met with a similarly murky fate. Administration officials showed "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," the general counsel for the National Security Archive tells the AP. "It seems like they just didn't want the e-mails preserved."
(More White House stories.)

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