Re: Republicans -- UPDATE

CNN has the story:

Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the Bush White House had said were missing...

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.

The Huffington Post talks specifics:

Mother Jones on Monday detailed the "years-long legal battle" that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA) fought against the Bush administration over archiving problems that led to the loss of over 20 million White House emails.

The Bush administration first ran into archiving problems in 2003 but didn't begin to address the problem until October 2005. CREW and NSA filed the lawsuit in order to "force the White House to recover missing emails and implement an effective archiving system that would prevent important presidential records from being lost or misplaced in the future."

After months of balking, the Obama administration reached a settlement with the plaintiffs, under which the White House must recover a total of 94 days of missing emails from 2003 to 2005, all of which will be transferred to the National Archives for preservation and eventual release.

Norm Eisen wrote on the White House blog that "the President is firmly committed to ensuring that the records of this Administration--as well as those of all previous administrations--are properly retained and preserved. We are pleased to see this matter reach an amicable resolution."

UPDATE: 94 day period includes CIA cover-up dates.

[source: CNN, White House, The Huffington Post]