More than 22 million e-mails from former US president George W. Bush’s time in the White House have been recovered by technicians, said two groups that sued to force disclosure of the electronic messages.
The material will be reviewed by representatives of US President Barack Obama as well as officials from the Bush administration before the messages are turned over to the National Archives, the groups said.
The private groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive, said the Obama administration has agreed to do a better job preserving White House communications as part of a settlement of the case.
“We have done our best in this case to maximize the number of e-mails that have been found or reconstructed from disaster-recovery backup tapes,” said Kristen Lejnieks, counsel for the Washington-based National Security Archive, in a statement. “The government now can find and search over 22 million more e-mails than they could in late 2005.”
Meredith Fuchs, an attorney for the National Security Archive, said in an interview that many of the messages won’t be available to the public for at least five years.
Lejnieks said the settlement also means that backup computer tapes from 94 calendar days during the Bush administration will be restored.
“We certainly hope that many major gaps in the record have been filled,” she said.
The groups sued in 2007, seeking millions of White House e-mails created in 2003-2005, including the period of Bush’s successful re-election campaign in 2004.
The messages were reported lost after being recorded on backup tapes that were routinely overwritten, a White House official said last year.
A federal judge in January ordered the Bush administration, just days before it left office, to search all White House computers and turn over any of the lost e-mails it found.
The White House’s Office of Administration isn’t covered by the Freedom of Information Act and can keep records of what could be millions of other lost e-mails from the public, a federal appeals court ruled in May.
Congress enacted FOIA in 1966 to provide public access to certain categories of government records. The act requires federal agencies to disclose information upon reasonable requests.
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