City releases 5,018 ‘lost’ e-mails

Boston city officials, after previously contending that they could find only 18 e-mails on the computer of one of Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s top aides, yesterday produced copies of more than 5,000 e-mails sent or received by the official, who had been double-deleting his correspondence for the last five years.

City officials also said they had found and transferred to the US attorney’s office a separate packet of Michael J. Kineavy’s e-mails, mostly fragments, as part of the city’s response to a federal subpoena in a corruption investigation of former state senator Dianne Wilkerson and current City Councilor Chuck Turner. A key witness in the pending probe has identified Kineavy as Wilkerson’s sole contact in the Menino administration in her alleged effort to secure a liquor license for a Roxbury nightclub.

The 5,018 e-mails released yesterday were culled from the accounts of other city employees who communicated electronically with Kineavy. They do not include any e-mails that Kineavy exchanged with people outside City Hall, even though the secretary of state had ordered the city to recover all of Kineavy’s e-mails. City officials said retrieving those messages would require scouring his hard drive and city backup tapes and could cost $250,000.

“The report we’re getting back is that this is extremely difficult and problematic,’’ said William Sinnott, the city’s chief lawyer. “ ‘Cost-prohibitive’ is also coming back.’’

The e-mails related to the Wilkerson and Turner probes were not released. Sinnott said the city did not want to jeopardize the ongoing investigation. Federal prosecutors had subpoenaed the city last fall, asking for all communications, including e-mail, between Kineavy and Wilkerson, Turner, or their aides.

A review of the e-mails released yesterday provided a rare glimpse into the nitty-gritty, sometimes raw inner workings of Menino’s City Hall, where the mayor’s political interests are fiercely protected by his most senior aides. Seemingly no issue is too mundane to rise to the concern of the mayor’s Cabinet officials.

Kineavy’s e-mails, for example, show him overseeing everything from an annual Christmas trolley tour to a blown street light on Beacon Hill, to the jerseys that will bear the mayor’s name in a youth football league in Charlestown. The e-mails show senior mayoral aides attempting to shut down potential critics - canceling, for example, a city councilor’s tour of a partially built branch library in Mattapan out of concern that the councilor would begin raising questions about the project. The aides also closely watch neighborhood disputes, such as one involving a community center in South Boston, as well as City Hall hiring decisions.

In his first public comments about the deleted e-mails, Kineavy yesterday said that even though he was double-deleting every day for five years - dragging e-mails to the trash and then emptying the trash - he thought his e-mails still would be saved on city backup servers.

“I’m sorry for making that assumption, because I feel like I caused a lot of people headaches, a lot of people in this room who have worked hard to try to get things back,’’ said Kineavy, who was flanked by four city lawyers and the mayor’s press secretary in a City Hall conference room. “I made an assumption, it was a wrong assumption, and that’s what it was.’’

Secretary of State William F. Galvin said his office had not determined yet whether the city’s actions have fully satisfied his order, saying he had not yet reviewed what the city had recovered so far.

“If there’s a significant body of material that seems to be missing, we’ll have to ask them about that,’’ he said.

Galvin had ordered the city to seize Kineavy’s hard drive and hire a forensics firm to try to retrieve his deleted e-mails last week after the Globe reported that Kineavy had been deleting them in possible violation of state public records law. The revelation came after the newspaper’s public records request for six months’ worth of Kineavy’s e-mails turned up only 18 messages, and city officials blamed the low number on his double-deletion habit.

State public records law requires municipal employees to save e-mail for two years, even if the contents are of “no informational or evidential value.’’ Violations can result in fines of up to $500 or one year in prison.

City officials complied with Galvin’s order by seizing Kineavy’s hard drive and hiring a computer forensics firm, StoneTurn Group, to recover Kineavy’s e-mails. But an initial forensic examination of the hard drive turned up only 60 e-mails, so city officials combed through other city in-boxes instead.

“The opinion of StoneTurn Group is that we could sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into this and probably not get anything more than we’re getting out of this much more lucrative area of forensics they’ve pointed us to,’’ Sinnott said.

City officials stopped short of saying that Kineavy or others had broken public records laws, but they did acknowledge that city employees had not been trained appropriately on saving e-mails under the law.

“We did a very poor job of educating our e-mail users to what the technical side was capable of doing,’’ said Dot Joyce, the mayor’s spokeswoman.

The city has now instituted a program that keeps copies of every e-mail sent or received by every city employee.

Kineavy said he deleted e-mails every day because he simply likes to keep a clean workspace. “That’s what I would do on a daily basis, so I’d come in the next day and there’s a fresh start,’’ he said. “The fact that I Windex my desk, I’ve gotten a lot of grief for that, but I’m a creature of habit.’’

Slack, Levenson, Rezendes, and Ebbert can be reached at dslack@globe.com, mlevenson@globe.com, rezendes@globe.com, and ebbert@globe.com.