Tip leads paper on circuitous e-mail hunt

Government e-mails are, by law, public documents, meaning it sounded like an easy lead to track. It was anything but. The ensuing quest took four months, a half-dozen requests and letters, and the involvement of two lawyers - and ended with $2,773 in city charges. It also led to the city providing the full e-mail complement of just one employee and a few random e-mails of another.

The effort, with all its delays and costs, offers a glimpse of how difficult it can be in some cases to wrest public documents from Boston City Hall, despite a state law requiring their disclosure.

The first request was filed in April. The Globe wanted copies of 18 months’ worth of e-mails sent or received by eight employees referencing campaign activities or the mayor’s opponents. A month later the city said it would charge $2,200 to provide the material. After conferring with its lawyer, the newspaper narrowed its request to one employee, Michael J. Kineavy, Menino’s chief policy adviser and key political strategist. The search turned up only 23 e-mails, none in the right time period.

An amended request soon followed, asking for all of the e-mails sent or received by Kineavy and five others during a six-month period. That elicited various responses from the city, ranging from the need for more time to assertions that it may not provide the e-mails at all.

In mid-July, as the newspaper prepared for a potential court battle, Dot Joyce, the mayor’s press secretary, turned over Kineavy’s e-mails for the six-month period. There were 18. Among them were résumés from people looking for work at City Hall, a bicycling newsletter, and pictures of friends. One friend wanted tickets to the Bruins game at Fenway Park on New Year’s Day. Another wanted Kineavy to get a city employee admitted to a union.

Joyce explained that there were so few because Kineavy regularly deleted e-mails on his computer. In a letter, she wrote that “[m]any emails sent and received’’ by city employees do not have to be saved under the law and therefore “may be deleted when no longer needed.’’ She wrote that searching for backup copies of Kineavy’s e-mails on city servers would take “at minimum hundreds of hours at unknown cost.’’

The Globe’s outside lawyer, Jonathan Albano, quickly fired off a letter, reminding the city of its duty under the law to save all but the most inconsequential e-mails for at least two years, even those with “no informational or evidential value.’’ Albano urged the city to immediately order employees to stop deleting e-mails and asked the city to search the servers for Kineavy’s e-mails sent or received on a single day, in order to better estimate the cost.

The city responded that it was “grappling with establishing and maintaining a cost-efficient email retention, storage, and retrieval policy,’’ an effort complicated by budget cuts. One week later, after another letter from Albano, the city’s chief lawyer, William Sinnott, agreed to instruct employees to stop deleting e-mails and explained that Kineavy had in fact been “double deleting’’ his e-mails on a daily basis - dragging them into his computer’s trash bin, then emptying the bin. He said the double deletion meant copies were not saved on city servers, which create backup copies only once a day.

Once the city printed out the 1,700 e-mails of the second mayoral aide, officials told the Globe that it would charge $1,660 for cover sheets on top of each e-mail - in addition to the original estimate of $2,500. Then Menino stepped in to stop it. Finally, the city declined to give the e-mails to the Globe but required a reporter to read them in a city office. The newspaper still paid $2,500.

Two weeks ago, after the Globe published a story about Kineavy’s deletion of e-mails, Secretary of State William F. Galvin ordered the city to seize Kineavy’s computer and hire a computer forensics expert to try to retrieve the deleted e-mails. The expert is expected to share with Galvin the results of the probe by tomorrow.

Stephanie Ebbert of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.