London, Dec. 14 : Two US watchdogs, who have dragged the Bush administration to the court for failing to maintain its email records, have claimed that computer technicians have uncovered 22 million White House e-mails from the former US President’s tenure.

However, a former Bush spokesman, though, dismissed the claim as overblown.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive are settling lawsuits they filed in 2007 over the failure of the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.

Fox News quoted Meredith Fuchs of the National Security Archive, as saying: "Many poor choices were made during the Bush administration and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records."

Melanie Sloan, CREW''s executive director, added: “We may never discover the full story of what happened here. It seems like they just didn''t want the e-mails preserved."

The groups claim that there is not yet a final count on the extent of missing White House e-mails and there may never be a complete tally.

However former Bush spokesman Scott Stanzel said that an IT issue was blown out of proportion, and being presented at a spooky conspiracy.

“The liberal group CREW litigates for sport, distorts the facts and has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues. Their misleading statements about our work demonstrates their continued anti-Bush agenda, nearly a year after a new president was sworn in,” he said.

Stanzel claimed that the e-mails referred to Monday were those already identified and recovered by the Bush administration before President Obama took office. (ANI)