E-mail inquiry goes to Coakley

A five-week investigation by Galvin’s office has recovered as many as 48,000 e-mails, he said, more than enough to show that the aide, Michael J. Kineavy, deleted messages with substantive content that should have been preserved under the law.

“After a review of the recovered records, it is clear that some records were deleted inappropriately and without permission,’’ Galvin said in a statement. “It is the jurisdiction of the attorney general’s office to make a determination whether there has been a violation of law.’’

State law requires municipal employees to save e-mail correspondence for at least two years, even if it has “no informational or evidential value.’’ Kineavy had been “double-deleting’’ every e-mail he sent and nearly every one he received daily for the past five years.

Attorney General Martha Coakley vowed yesterday to conduct a thorough investigation and said her focus will be on determining whether Kineavy’s deletions were a deliberate attempt to hide information from the public.

“What we know now was there was a deletion of the e-mails,’’ she said in an interview. “But does that translate to a willful, intentional skirting of the law and the spirit and the letter of the law?’’

Coakley, who had been assisting Galvin’s investigation for two weeks, said her processing of the case is likely to take a significant amount of time, considering the sheer volume of messages that investigators have to sift through. She said there is no way the investigation will be complete before the mayoral election on Nov. 3.

“We’re literally starting today on something that has thousands and thousands of documents,’’ she said. “We’re going to do the job that we need to do, and we’re going to take the time to do it right.’’

The Menino administration, which has acknowledged lapses in training employees on public records law, pledged full cooperation. The mayor said he is confident that no evidence of wrongdoing will be found.

“I know the individuals,’’ Menino said. “I don’t think there’s any intent at all to skirt the law.’’

Kineavy abruptly took an unpaid leave from his City Hall job Oct. 6, saying he did not want the e-mail issue to be a distraction, but he continues in his role as a political operative in Menino’s reelection campaign.

Councilor at Large Michael F. Flaherty, who is seeking to unseat Menino in the election, seized on the news that Coakley is now investigating the mayor’s top aide.

“The mayor has been very dismissive of this investigation from day one, even cavalier,’’ Flaherty said at a press conference, pointing out that the mayor has in the past characterized the deletions as a simple glitch.

Flaherty called on Coakley to complete her investigation before the election, so voters will know the results before they cast their ballots.

Coakley countered that Flaherty should know better than to suggest the investigation could be done that quickly. “For someone, particularly someone who’s a lawyer, to suggest this investigation should be done in 10 days or I’m not doing my job, is completely off-base,’’ she said.

The city, responding to orders from Galvin last month, seized Kineavy’s computer and hired a forensics firm to retrieve deleted e-mails. Galvin acted after the Globe reported that Kineavy had been routinely deleting the messages. The forensics firm recovered roughly 10,000 messages, and the city, at Galvin’s behest, posted them on the Internet.

A review of a portion of those e-mails did not reveal anything stunning or criminal in nature, but they do provide an unprecendented window into the Menino administration and the work of Kineavy, his chief of policy and planning and a key campaign strategist. They showed Kineavy using his outsize influence to land jobs for people outside City Hall, to intervene in labor disputes and permit issues, to keep close tabs on critics of the mayor, and to thwart actions by neighborhood groups or the City Council that he perceived would undercut Menino.

After the city posted the e-mails it recovered, Galvin’s office hired its own forensics firm to scour the hard drives used by Kineavy, Galvin said. That firm, Guidance Software, recovered a total of 48,000 documents, he said, though not all of them may belong to Kineavy and some may be calendar appointments and duplicates. Galvin said the city will have an opportunity to sift through them and make sure there is no private personnel or medical information before they are released to the public.

“Our goal was to retrieve and make public whatever we can going forward,’’ Galvin said in an interview. In the meantime, he said, his office turned over copies of everything recovered to Coakley, who, in addition to serving as the state’s chief prosecutor, is a leading candidate in the US Senate race.

Coakley said the section of the state public records law that applies to this case dates to 1939 and seems fairly straightforward. It reads: “Whoever unlawfully keeps in his possession any public record or removes it from the room where it is usually kept, or alters, defaces, mutilates or destroys any public record or violates any provision of this chapter shall be punished by a fine of not less than ten nor more than five hundred dollars, or by imprisonment for not more than one year.’’

Coakley said complications arise when determining how e-mails are defined - as phone records, for example, or as letters or documents in a file cabinet - because the technology did not exist when the law was written.

“If you are doing the government’s business and you’re doing it by e-mail, it’s probably pretty clear these are public records,’’ she said. “But it’s not totally clear.’’

The statute is also not altogether clear on whether charges would be criminal or civil, but Coakley said her office probably would pursue criminal charges if it found violations.

Kineavy’s e-mails, which were first requested by the Globe in April, have also been the subject of a federal subpoena as part of a corruption investigation against former state senator Dianne Wilkerson and Councilor Chuck Turner. Federal prosecutors have not said whether the city has satisfied the subpoena.

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