Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House emails from the George W. Bush administration, according to two groups that are settling lawsuits they filed over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system.

The two groups — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive — made the announcement as they settled lawsuits they'd filed against the executive office of the president in 2007.

But the public might not see any of the emails for some time because they will now go through the National Archives' normal process for releasing presidential and agency records.

'We may never discover the full story of what happened here,'— Melanie Sloane, executive director of citizens group

The tally of missing emails and the settlement are the latest development in a controversy surrounding the failure by the Bush administration to install a properly working electronic record-keeping system.

The two private organizations said there is not yet a final count on the extent of missing White House email and there may never be a complete tally.

"Many poor choices were made during the Bush administration, and there was little concern about the availability of email records, despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive.

"We may never discover the full story of what happened here," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "It seems like they just didn't want the emails preserved."

Sloan said the latest count of misplaced emails "gives us confirmation that the Bush administration lied when they said no emails were missing."

The two groups say the 22 million White House emails were previously mislabelled and effectively lost.

The recovered emails — located over the past year by White House contractors — will now become part of the archived collection of papers at the National Archives and Records Administration.