Perino: 5M E-Mails May Be Lost

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino Friday said as many as 5 million White House e-mails may have been lost.

Perino told the daily press briefing the loss may have occurred when the White House migrated from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook in 2002 and 2003. Additionally, until 2004 accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee were on an automatic purge cycle.

The White House this week said it could not find a number of e-mails requested by congressional inquiries into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. Of 1,700 employees working in the White House, 22 have e-mail accounts maintained by the RNC to prevent violations of the Hatch Act, which bans political work using government resources. However, some official business may have been conducted using the RNC e-mail.

Federal law requires all White House e-mail to be archived for posterity.

Perino said there was no deliberate effort to delete any e-mail but it may have occurred inadvertently.

Congressional staffers claim a Republican Party lawyer told them that missing White House e-mail may have been deliberately deleted by adviser Karl Rove.

The Republican National Committee, however, said the staffers mischaracterized a briefing about controversial missing e-mail messages, saying the RNC lawyer was speaking hypothetically, The Washington Post reported.