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The Obama administration has found 22 million e-mails that went missing in the White House of President George W. Bush. The administration says it will restore e-mails from 94 specific days, including some periods of drama in the Bush White House.
The 94 days fall between January 2003 and April 2005. The e-mails are covered in an agreement negotiated by the Obama White House with two watchdog groups that had sued the Bush White House in 2007.
White House Special Counsel Norm Eisen says it's a good government issue. "This is part of the plan that we have in the Obama administration really to set a new benchmark for openness and transparency in government," he said.
The process of archiving e-mails is important for preserving presidential records. Some of the e-mails are likely to hold inside details of bitter partisan battles.
The two groups in the deal with the White House are the National Security Archive at George Washington University and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW.
The agreement let them pick out about a month's worth of days from which e-mails will be recovered. They chose days when the Bush White House said it archived unusually small numbers of e-mails even though big things were happening.
