Today at the White House press briefing, Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked about CREW's report that the White House lost FIVE MILLION e-mails. She could not dispute our finding. Here's the video -- the transcript is below:

Q Dana, if I could follow. We have mentioned before the group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. They issued this report, and they are saying their analysis shows that between March 2003-October 2005, there were hundreds of days in which emails were missing -- this being in the White House system, not the RNC -- and that this equated -- it was estimated that roughly over 5 million email messages were missing.

MS. PERINO: I don't know if that group actually has -- I don't know how they do an analysis on an internal White House system. But I did check it out, and we are in communication with the Office of Administration to see if there are days or partial days when there were emails that would have gone missing. And in terms of -- "missing" is a word that -- maybe misplaced, or not necessarily lost forever. I think there are backup tapes, there are different ways in order to go back and find emails.

And in talking with them and with the Counsel's Office, there is no indication that anyone who is working on a server or in terms of technical capability that would be able to look at a server, clean up a server, or, in terms of when we converted from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook if there would have been any potential loss there, that there was any intentional loss of any document. I think that those folks take those jobs very seriously and endeavor to make sure that all of the records are preserved for the Presidential Records Act, as well as the Federal Records Act.

Q So, just to be clear, are you taking issue with their conclusions, or are you just saying --

MS. PERINO: I'm not taking issue with their conclusions at this point. We're checking into them. And, again, there's 1,700 people in the Executive Office of the President. I don't know how -- we'll try to find out how many emails a day are sent with that many people. I can assure you it's a high number. But I also will tell you that the technical folks that we've spoken to in the preliminary discussions was that if there had been an inadvertent human error or a technical problem where there were days where emails might have been misplaced, that either, one -- well, one, it wouldn't have been intentional; and, two, there are ways that we can try to gather those if need be.

Think about it. I mean, there are sometimes -- and I don't have a list of the days with me -- but if it was a Saturday or a Sunday, oftentimes because we have such a large organization that works 24/7, but mostly Monday through Friday, if they do any maintenance on our servers, just like in your organizations, they often do it on times when it's slow -- slow periods. And so if they are looking at those days -- we just need to do a little bit more work before I can answer definitively.

Q So, to your knowledge, there's no problem within the White House email system, in terms of messages or emails that have been deleted? Or at this point, you just don't know?