The White House is accused of destroying key government records by losing e-mails written by the President and key advisers such as Karl Rove between 2002 and 2005.

The US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been investigating reports that an estimated five million messages between 2003 and 2005 allegedly vanished from e-mail servers housed within the President's office.

A hearing convened by the committee gave Democratic leaders a new chance to press White House officials publicly on how and when they expect to recover the files.

"We still know virtually nothing about the status of the alleged missing White House e-mails," said Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a Californian Democrat.

The White House has ignored requests from The National Archives and Records Administration about the missing e-mails.

Republican leaders focused concern on the prospect of missing nuggets of presidential history and have blamed the lost e-mails on the switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange for the White House's e-mail system in 2002.

White House chief information officer Theresa Payton assured the committee that her office is working actively on a multi-step restoration process. Payton also said she felt "comfortable" that "disaster recovery backup tapes" could be used to locate missing e-mails, adding that process would be time-consuming and could cost at least US$15 million.

A separate issue under scrutiny revolves around charges that Karl Rove and some 50 other presidential advisers were using Republican National Committee accounts to conduct official business and thus subvert federal record-keeping laws. The RNC has said it had virtually no records of e-mails sent on its servers by Rove and others before November 2003, which Democrats argue is troubling because those messages may contain important official information about the president's decision to go to war in Iraq.

Waxman said he heard from RNC officials as recently as Monday that the White House had made no effort to request backup tapes from the committee that may contain those files. He scolded White House officials for their inaction. Both Payton and her boss, White House Office of Administration director Alan Swendiman, said they wouldn't be responsible for making such requests but would look into who is.

Republicans accused the Democrats of pursuing the investigation simply to dig up dirt on Rove and waste hundreds of thousands of dollars of money that the RNC could be using to shore up its candidates' campaigns.

However the loss of documents is potentially significant because federal laws, including the Presidential Records Act, requires the White House to preserve all documents related to the president and vice president's official business and turn them over to the National Archives. Personal records, including political campaign-related materials, are expected to be filed separately and not subject to the same restrictions. The matter has already sparked a lawsuit from an advocacy group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

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