White House probes claim of millions of missing e-mails

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration is looking into a watchdog group's claim that more than 5 million White House e-mails from 2003-05 are missing.

The claim by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a left-leaning watchdog group in Washington, comes as congressional Democrats probe the administration's firing of eight prosecutors, which they allege was political interference with the judiciary.

Administration officials have found no evidence that e-mails were intentionally destroyed, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Friday. But she did not rule out that millions were unaccounted for.

"I'm not taking issue with their conclusions at this point. We're checking into them," she told a news conference. The e-mails are "maybe misplaced, or not necessarily lost forever" and White House aides are looking at ways to possibly retrieve them, she said.

The Washington-based group's report, quoting unnamed sources, said the White House had found that records for hundreds of days of e-mail traffic were missing from March 2003 to October 2005.

In another strand of inquiry, the head of the US House of Representatives' government oversight committee this week said some records of Republican Party e-mail accounts used by White House aides were missing.

Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, said that e-mails involving President George W. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, may be gone.

The White House has denied allegations that administration officials intentionally used outside e-mail accounts to sidestep legal requirements to save records of official government business.

Democrats allege the Bush administration improperly meddled with the judiciary when it fired the prosecutors last year. Bush has denied any wrongdoing, insisting the federal attorneys were let go for poor performance.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the top US justice official, has faced calls to resign after giving shifting accounts of his role in the dismissals and because his department mishandled requests by Congress for information.

Two Justice Department aides have resigned over the scandal since mid-March.