Five million missing Bush Administration emails has quadrupled to 22 million emails that have been recovered from the Bush White House camp, following lawsuit by CREW & National Security Archive. President Obama searches for more Bush White House emails suspected missing, while Americans won't see the found email records before 2014, after America's next Presidential election.
It seems first reports of what was thought to be up to five million missing emails, emails suspected of having gone missing from the George W. Bush camp during Bush's American Presidency, was staggeringly low. December marked the month when that five million missing emails number more than quadrupled, when nearly 22 million Bush emails had actually vanished.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), one of the two groups involved in filed 2007 lawsuit regarding the missing White House emails, issued reports entitled "WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and Violations of the PRA," with disclosure that the Bush White House had lost over FIVE MILLION e-mails in just a two-year timeframe.
But then again, that number proved extremely low. Seems math skills related to the Bush camp were up to par, at least in terms of subtraction. CREW claimed that through two confidential sources it was learned that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) had lost (or possibly Bush would better deem it 'misplaced') over FIVE MILLION EMAILS generated between March 2003 and October 2005. CREW claims "The White House Counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records," said CREW. At the time, Executive Director for CREW Melanie Sloan issued the following statement:
"It’s clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration – that they didn’t want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn’t clear on the law – are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing – and potentially incriminating – emails have gone missing. It’s the Nixon White House all over again."
It seems something has now been done to find those missing emails, and that 'something' has turned into a number that might surprise even CREW. The Huffington Post now says emails have been FOUND for the George W. Bush Administration-only that number of 'Found' Bush emails seems to be greatly exceeding the number thought to be 'Lost'. 22 Million emails from the George W. Bush administration have been discovered, or rather recovered, depending how you look at it; For Mr. Bush, it's probably the former. There's some chaos happening in Washington, where computer technicians have now located 22 million previously missing White House e-mails. But it's not over: seems President Obama's camp suspects there may be more Bush emails, just waiting to be found.
While the 22 million missing emails, now recovered, were from the administration of President George W. Bush, the Obama Administration is searching for dozens more days' of e-mail from the Bush years. Two groups have filed lawsuit over Bush White House failure to install an electronic record keeping system. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) in Washington and the National Security Archive, two separate groups that have filed lawsuit pertaining to the missing Bush Administration emails, is settling the lawsuits they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.
But it will be years before the American public gets to actually see any of the recovered e-mails, the Bush Administration emails now scheduled to go through the National Archives' process for releasing Presidential and agency records. 2014, four years from now, is the earliest those Presidential email records of the Bush administration will be available for public viewing. That date is probably more than fine for Republican supporters, allowing the potential scandal to be glossed over during the next upcoming Presidential elections. In the meantime, President Obama's camp continues the search for more missing emails that Americans won't see until 2014.
Former Bush White House spokesman Scott Stanzel issued statement to the effect that the 22 million e-mails had been recovered while Bush was still in Presidential office, that what he deemed 'misleading statements' about the former Bush Administration's work demonstrate "a continued anti-Bush agenda, nearly a year after a new [American] President [Obama] was sworn in." Said Stanzel, "The liberal groups CREW and National Security Archive litigate for sport, distort the facts and have consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues." Those appear to be quite some "standard IT issues" for a country devoted to national security.
Those 22 million Bush Administration 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." Patrick Leahy, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman (D-Vt), said the Bush Administration had been dismissive of congressional requests for recovery of the missing Bush camp e-mails.
Two Federal laws require White House Administration to preserve records, which in the case of the missing emails, at least, seems to have been ignored. The Bush White House's failure to install a properly working electronic record keeping system has been in the spotlight, particularly after the millions of missing email records.
Organizations like CREW (mailing address and url attached) and the National Security Archive help keep government entities in check, less out of wack.