By Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t
A government watchdog group now says ten to twenty million White House emails, which may contain information about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA status, have been destroyed by the Bush administration.
In a report from April, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) detailed a massive hole in the White House email records. The report, titled “Without a Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act,” accused the Bush administration of destroying “more than 5 million” emails and failing to attempt to recover them.
According to CREW, their sources now tell them the number of missing emails is probably between ten and twenty million.
Anne Weisman, CREW’s chief counsel said the revised estimate “highlights that this is a very serious and systematic problem at the White House.” Currently CREW, along with The National Security Archives are suing the Bush administration in an attempt to force the administration to restore the missing documents from backup tapes.