Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the Bush White House had said were missing, two watchdog groups that sued over the documents announced Monday.
The e-mails date from 2003 to 2005, and had been "mislabeled and effectively lost," according to the National Security Archive, a research group based at George Washington University. But Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it could be years before most of the e-mails are made public.
Will anything interesting emerge re Plamegate?
Also requested were several days surrounding the announcement that a criminal investigation was under way into the disclosure of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. That investigation led to the conviction of White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents investigating the leak.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington represented Wilson and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in a lawsuit over her exposure, which they argued was in retaliation for his accusation that the Bush administration over-hyped the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. A federal judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds in 2007, but Sloan said the missing e-mails raise the "strong possibility" that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never received all the documents he requested during the leak investigation.
And the excuses of Bush apparatchiks don't sound more convincing as time goes by:
But Scott Stanzel, a former deputy press secretary in the Bush White House, said the group "has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues."
"We always indicated that there is an e-mail archiving system and a disaster recovery system," Stanzel said. "We also indicated that e-mails not properly archived could be found on disaster recovery tapes. There is a big, big difference between something not being properly archived and it being 'lost' or 'missing,' as CREW would say."
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