As reported by my colleague Jo Mannies on the Mother Ship the Blunt administration has been sued by attorneys investigating the alleged destruction of e-mails in the governor’s office. The lawsuit alleges that employees in the Office of Administration stood up to attempts by the governor’s office to get them to erase backup tapes.
This morning on the House floor, during debate over the Office of Administration budget, Democrat Jeff Harris of Columbia, who is running for attorney general, took a moment to commend the OA employees who allegedly stood up to the governor’s office.
Meanwhile, at a news conference to announce her intention to make a variety of tax cuts if she’s elected governor, state Treasurer Sarah Steelman said it would be inappropriate for her to comment on the lawsuit.
It’s okay that the National Government Security’s hub is in Bridgeton where everyone’s typed information online is recorded there at the rate of the equivalent of 1000 encyclopedias per second.
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Exactly right, it doesnt matter what you or I do with our hotmail accounts. Gov’t officials are bound by law to preserve and reproduce recorded communication.
Maybe someday the emails will show us exactly what all those great ‘accomplishments’ were that led the boy guv into retirement. Should be interesting.
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A recent you tube of Ed Martin’s railed against using taxpayers money for mortgage bailouts. I am wondering why he thinks it is acceptable for the taxpayers to pay his legal bills, especially since he seems to have been pushing a personal, religious and political agenda in the said missing emails. I am puzzeled by all of this, perhaps EM can explain.
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Kenrick and Nick,
1. It doesn’t matter what you or I do. We’re not bound by state law that mandates that we preserve our emails. Don’t like it, then change the law. Also, the policy for email retention was laid out by Blunt when he was secretary of state, so he was most certainly familiar with the policy and law. Blunt did not have any issue with the law until he was asked to turnover emails himself.
2. The emails aren’t preserved on individual computers. They are preserved on backup tapes that the suit alleges Blunt and Co. ordered destroyed/copied over.
3. The people investigating this include Republicans and they are led by a former head of the Highway Patrol. Nixon went well out of his way to try to ensure impartiality of the investigators and the investigation itself.
I’ll assume that neither of you are suggesting that it’s OK for the governor and/or his staff to knowingly break the law. The Sunshine Law is there to protect all of us. A state employee who attempted to do the right thing was fired for it, his reputation was drug through the mud, and public records (that’s OUR property) were willfully destroyed. All of this behavior itself begs the question of what was going on that we’ll never know about. And remember, it’s almost never the crime but the cover up that gets public officials in trouble.
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Nick Kissoff:
Yeah, investigation…..fishy.
Deleted emails right after media requests them….perfectly fine.
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KEnrick,
Storage of emails in a non-network hard drive doesn’t slow your PC. But thank you for injecting yourself into a technical matter you know nothing about.
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The e-mails of interest were those between the staff in the Governor’s office regarding state business. It was awfully convenient that they were “purged” shortly after discussions about the ethanol bill and a few other things.
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I have no idea whether this suit has any merit or not – that’s for a court to determine. But somehow, when a committee appointed by the Democrat who is running for governor files a suit against the Republican who is serving as governor, it smells awfully fishy.
And Kenrick, I agree – I also get an absurd number of e-mails, and only keep a very few of them. I can only imagine the daily flood of e-mail the governor’s office must receive.
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This whole uproar about the E-Mails is a bunch of hooey, how many of us keep all of our E-Mails?. I did not get to the computer yesterday, so this morning I had to zap 180 E-Mails. Our computers would be so clogged up and slow that we could not do anything if we did not delete the E-Mails.
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