Government Email: Still The Rage
January 10th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
The Carnival of Open Records has recognized John Washburn, ‘that guy from Milwaukee’ as the ‘Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week’ after he received confirmation postmarked Jan. 8 that staffers are compiling the emails he paid for from Gov. Rick Perry’s office and will send them within 10 business days. That revises my earlier projected receipt/publish date — expect them to be available around Jan. 22 (my naive estimate earlier was Jan. 13).
If only Perry had not been regularly deleting his emails, he might not have such a tenacious open records notable on his trail right now. It should be a lesson to officeholders and bureaucracies everywhere. Look around. This government email thing is all the rage.
Look at Houston’s embattled district attorney (who has already taken his name off the ballot). The saga of Charles A Rosenthal Jr. is one long government email hemmorhage — complete with campaigning from a government perch, making horrible jokes, forwarding absolute crap, and hurling slurs. Ralph Blumenthal reports:
On Aug. 14, Mr. Rosenthal forwarded to friends a message attacking the record of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and calling her “a disaster for all Americans.” His name appeared on messages comparing her to Karl Marx…
The emails also contain racist, sexist, and profane elements. The list of exactly what is contained in Rosenthal’s email just isn’t publishable. It’s crap. And it’s amazing that it coursed through a major government agency’s email system without anyone calling somebody. To me, anyway, it boggles the mind.
On top of these, Rosenthal apparently deleted 2,500 government emails. Just, poof! They’re gone. I wonder why.
The White House is having its own government email party, too.
In a case arising out of the investigation into who dropped the name of Valerie Plame, on Jan. 8 federal magistrate John Facciola ordered the White House to determine whether missing emails from 2003-2005 were among computer backup files. The White House was given five business days to respond. The order grew out of a lawsuit seeking the missing emails by two private groups — the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
In a rather revealing paragraph, the Associated Press story related another one of those astounding claims of imperial untouchableness asserted so often by the Bush White House:
Two federal laws require the White House to preserve all records, including email; but in asking that the two lawsuits be dismissed, the White House asserts that the president’s record-keeping practices under the Presidential Records Act are not subject to review by the courts.
Taken together, these three sets of inquiries certainly make the case that officeholders really should be keeping their government email, and it’s a reminder to all of us that asking for those electronic documents is key.
