Missouri governor, aides accused of ordering e-mail purge
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.—Gov. Matt Blunt or his top deputies ordered Missouri's backup e-mail tapes to be destroyed to avoid complying with an open-records request from The Associated Press, a lawsuit filed by state investigators alleged Monday.
The lawsuit was filed by investigators appointed by Attorney General Jay Nixon to look into whether Blunt's office had violated open-records laws by deleting some e-mails.
A former governor's office attorney sued Blunt earlier this year alleging he was fired for raising concerns that the office was not complying with the Sunshine Law or Missouri's document-retention policies.
The latest lawsuit seeks an injunction preventing Blunt or anyone acting on his behalf from accessing the backup e-mail tapes and an order that they be turned over to investigators and the court. It also asks a Cole County judge to direct Blunt's administration to comply -- at no cost -- with the investigator's own Sunshine Law request for governor's office e-mail records.
Without examining the backup e-mail files, investigators cannot fully complete their task of determining whether Blunt's office improperly deleted any e-mails, said attorney Chet Pleban, part of Nixon's appointed investigative team.
Shortly after former Blunt staffer Scott Eckersley went public with his allegations about his firing last fall, The AP filed an open-records request Oct. 31 seeking e-mails retrieved from the state's electronic backup files. Specifically, The AP sought e-mails sent or received by Blunt, Eckersley and several top governor's office employees.
In response to that request, a supervisor in the state's Office of Administration set aside the backup e-mail tapes that same day so they would not automatically be taped over as part of the state's standard 60-day retention cycle, the lawsuit said.
But later on Oct. 31, the lawsuit alleged, either Blunt, one of his top three deputies or someone acting under their direction indicated to acting administration commissioner Rich AuBuchon "that it would be in everyone's best interest" if the backup files were taped over.
The lawsuit claimed AuBuchon then told the state's chief information officer, Dan Ross, that "there was concern at a `higher level'" over the fact that the backup e-mail files had been set aside. Ross then asked two separate computer technology supervisors to place the backup e-mail tapes in line to be taped over, the lawsuit said.
Both supervisors refused to do so, the lawsuit said, and the next day the attorney general's office received a confidential tip from a government employee that Ross had sought to have the backup e-mail files destroyed.
Blunt spokeswoman Jessica Robinson claimed Monday that the lawsuit was "politically motivated," citing as evidence the fact that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported its details Monday before the governor's office or his attorney had received a copy of the lawsuit.
But Robinson refused to discuss the allegations because the matter was now in litigation.
Pleban dismissed as "nonsense" the assertion that the investigators' lawsuit was politically motivated. He said it was a government informant that led Nixon to appoint the investigative team on Nov. 15.
"We would have liked to have amicably resolved the controversy short of litigation, but the governor's office just wouldn't cooperate in that endeavor," Pleban said
