White House: E-mails on firings may have been killed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Some White House staff wrote e-mail messages about official business on Republican Party accounts, and some may have been wrongly deleted, the administration said Wednesday in a disclosure tied to the inquiry into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said it could not rule out the possibility that some official e-mails relating to the firings had been deleted and are lost.

Democrats in Congress have been seeking copies of e-mails from the Republican National Committee as part of an investigation into whether the firing of the prosecutors last year was politically motivated.

"Some official e-mails have potentially been lost and that is a mistake the White House is aggressively working to correct," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters.

Asked whether some of the lost e-mails could be related to the firings of the U.S. attorneys last year, Stanzel said: "That can't be ruled out."

Democrats reacted with scorn.

"This sounds like the administration's version of the dog ate my homework. I am deeply disturbed that just when this Administration is finally subjected to meaningful oversight, it cannot produce the necessary information," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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