Indicted Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom claimed Monday that among the many individuals attempting to recover files hosted on the file-sharing site shuttered by the U.S. government in January are a number of "high-ranking U.S. government officials."

Seven people, including Dotcom, and two corporations—Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited—were indicted by a New York grand jury on Jan. 5 and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. If convicted, those involved face up to 50 years in prison on all charges.

The U.S. Department of Justice worked with its international counterparts to arrest New Zealand resident Dotcom and others associated with Megaupload on Jan. 19 and shut down the site. The accused generated more than $175 million and caused more than $1 billion in harm via megaupload.com and other sites, the DOJ said.

In the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown, users expressed concern about the legitimate files they had stored on the service. What would happen to them? Back in January, the DOJ wasn't too hopeful about recovery, pointing to the fact that Megaupload's own terms of service warned users to keep backup files.

Dotcom, currently out on bail in New Zealand, told TorrentFreak this week that "Megaupload's legal team is working hard to reunite our users with their data. We are negotiating with the Department of Justice to allow all Mega users to retrieve their data."

In the process of working with the DOJ to help legitimate Megaupload users recover files, Dotcom claimed to have learned some interesting details about some of those users.

"Guess what—we found a large number of Mega accounts from U.S. government officials, including the Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate," he told TorrentFreak.

Megaupload's legal representatives and DOJ officials have spent the past few weeks hammering out details for allowing users temporary access to Megaupload-hosted files in order to retrieve them, Dotcom said.

"I hope we will soon have permission to give them and the rest of our users access to their files," he told TorrentFreak.

For more, see After Megaupload: 7 Sites the FBI Might Target Next and What Is Megaupload?

Chloe Albanesius contributed to this article.