Posted on 11/27/2011 5:16:18 AM PST by IbJensen
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney says his administration deleted all its emails near the end of his term specifically to frustrate political opponents. Though the move appears unorthodox, if not downright illegal, the Republican presidential candidate claims everything was above board and dismisses the recent flap about the emails as pure politics.
On November 17 the Boston Globe reported that at the end of 2006, just as Romney was leaving office and gearing up for his first presidential run, “11 of his top aides purchased their state-issued computer hard drives, and the Romney administration’s emails were all wiped from a server.” In addition, the remaining computers in the Governor’s office were replaced. “As a result,” explains the paper, “[Gov. Deval] Patrick’s office, which has been bombarded with inquires for records from the Romney era, has no electronic record of any Romney administration emails.”
Mark Nielsen, Romney’s chief legal counsel as Governor, told the Globe that the administration “fully complied with the law and complied with longstanding executive branch practice,” a refrain repeated by the Romney campaign. The campaign points out that in 1997 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the Governor is not explicitly included in the state Public Records Law, which requires the preservation of electronic communications.
However, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin, a Democrat, told the newspaper that the ruling “means that emails don’t have to be released to the public, but the governor’s office still has to preserve them and turn them over to the state archivist.”
“They have an obligation as a public official to preserve their records,” Galvin said. “Electronic records are held to the same standard as paper records. There’s no question. They’re not in some lesser standard.”
Galvin also questioned the sale of the hard drives to private parties; and Jeffrey Pyle, a Boston lawyer specializing in public records cases, told the Globe that the drives “should not have been sold as private property.”
As to the supposed “longstanding executive branch practice” of selling hard drives or any other public property to departing state employees, the Globe found that “top aides to the three Massachusetts governors who preceded Mitt Romney — all of them Republicans — said ... they know of no instance when state employees purchased their computer hard drive as they left the administration” and that “they were not familiar with such purchases as a long-standing practice.”
Given the highly irregular nature of the vanishing emails and hard drives, it was only natural that the press, curious as to whether Romney had something to hide, began peppering him with questions soon after the matter was first reported. The former Governor refused to answer directly for a few days. Finally, in an interview with the Nashua Telegraph, he responded: “Well, I think in government we should follow the law. And there has never been an administration that has provided to the opposition research team, or to the public, electronic communications. So ours would have been the first.”
Thus, to keep his administration’s emails hidden from both political opponents and the general public, Romney took the extraordinary step of obliterating all electronic evidence of those communications and then ensuring that the hardware itself was turned over to administration employees who would have every incentive to destroy it.
The Romney campaign is portraying the revelation of these unusual acts as a purely political move on the part of the Obama administration, aided and abetted by Obama’s friend Gov. Patrick, who campaigned for him in 2008.
“The last thing they [the Obama campaign] want to do is run against Mitt Romney in the general election,” Romney communications director Gail Gitcho told CNN. “In this case they have deployed or activated the Patrick Administration to do their dirty work.”
Accusing the Governor’s office of acting as “an opposition research arm of the Obama reelection campaign,” the Romney campaign filed a request for all email communications between Patrick’s office and Obama’s campaign.
The Democratic National Committee fired back with a request for all email from the Romney administration related to the hard drive purchases or containing “embarrassing subjects including ‘destroy records’ and ‘flip-flop,’” according to CNN. Obviously such email would have to be provided in printed form, perhaps found among the 700 boxes of public documents the Romney administration did send to the state archives. Locating the requested emails, therefore, could take months, which would certainly work to Romney’s advantage.
The Romney team is almost certainly correct that the motive behind leaking this story to the press was political, and its request for emails between the Patrick administration and the Obama campaign may uncover evidence of that. Nevertheless, curious observers want to know just what was so potentially damaging in his administration’s emails that Romney felt the need to go to such great lengths to prevent its discovery.
Other politicians and agencies have deleted email only to find they are copied to backups and preserved. Perhaps someone in Mass. will wake up and realize that they can recover them as well.
No doubt, someone kept copies.
I have three words: The Big Dig.
Good for Romney. Proves he’s not an idiot, which most of us already knew. But I don’t need private emails to tell me what I need to know about Romney, his public actions do enough.
Now I loathe Romney but this should be de rigueur for any smart politician to keep the MSM from using a small part of any communique to start a condemnation.
Also, RomneyCARE and RomneyJudges.
“The Massachusetts Republican Party died last Tuesday.
The cause of death: failed leadership.
The party is survived by a few leftover legislators
and a handful of county officials and grassroots activists
who have been ignored for years.
Services will be public and a mass exodus of taxpayers will follow.
In lieu of flowers, send messages to Republican voters
warning them about a certain presidential candidate named Romney.”
- Boston Herald, 11/12/2006
"In 2006, while Romney was chairman of the National Republican
Governors Association - a group dedicated to electing more
Republican governors - his own hand-picked Republican successor
as governor lost badly to the Democrat, despite the fact that Republicans
have held the governorship in Massachusetts since 1990. Romney largely
ignored the Massachusetts elections and spent most of the time
during the campaign out of state building his presidential campaign.
He came back and publicly campaigned for the Republican candidate
the day before the general election!
“Locally, this is a rebuke to Mitt Romney and checking out within six months
after being elected and having accomplished almost nothing,”
[Jim] Rappaport [former chairman of the state Republican Party]."
- Boston Globe, 11/8/2006
"Governor Mitt Romney, who touts his conservative credentials to out-of-state Republicans,
has passed over GOP lawyers for three-quarters of the 36 judicial vacancies he has faced,
instead tapping registered Democrats or independents -- including two gay lawyers who
have supported expanded same-sex rights, a Globe review of the nominations has found.
Of the 36 people Romney named to be judges or clerk magistrates, 23 are either registered Democrats
or unenrolled voters who have made multiple contributions to Democratic politicians
or who voted in Democratic primaries, state and local records show.
In all, he has nominated nine registered Republicans, 13 unenrolled voters,
and 14 registered Democrats."
- Boston Globe 7/25/2005
Romney Rewards one of the State's Leading Anti-Marriage Attorneys by Making him a Judge
Romney told the U.S. Senate on June 22, 2004, that the "real threat to the States is not the
constitutional amendment process, in which the states participate,
but activist judges who disregard the law and redefine marriage . . ."
Romney sounds tough but yet he had no qualms advancing the legal career of one
of the leading anti-marriage attorneys. He nominated Stephen Abany to a District Court.
Abany has been a key player in the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Bar Association which,
in its own words, is "dedicated to ensuring that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision
on marriage equality is upheld, and that any anti-gay amendment or legislation is defeated."
- U.S. Senate testimony by Gov. Mitt Romney, 6/22/2004 P>
"Romney announces he won't fill judicial vacancies before term ends
Despite his rhetoric about judicial activism, Romney announced that
he won't fill all the remaining vacancies during his term - but instead
leave them for his liberal Democrat successor!
Governor Mitt Romney pledged yesterday not to make a flurry of lame-duck
judicial appointments in the final days of his administration . . . David Yas,
editor of Lawyers Weekly, said Romney is "bucking tradition" by resisting the urge to
fill all remaining judgeships. "It is a tradition for governors to use that power to appoint judges
aggressively in the waning moments of their administration," Yas said.
He added that Romney has been criticized for failing to make judicial appointments.
"The legal community has consistently criticized him for not filling open seats quickly enough
and being a little too painstaking in the process and being dismissive of the input of the
Judicial Nominating Commission," Yas said.
- Boston Globe 11/2/2006
A full frontal lobotomy will also erase the past.
Then we will have the “new and improved Romney”
Amen to that. Someone who wants to make a LOT of money, will find them.
I’d like to hear little Willie Galvin’s opinion on Zero and Holder withholding Fast and Furious records. See how consistent the little democRAT is.
Bill Clinton did it brytrr. During eight years in office he sent only one email.
I am going to call that straight-up bull on that those destroyed emails were legally destroyed.
The problem with applying that line of reasoning to emails, is that emails are generally either FROM somebody who is not the gov, or TO somebody who is not the gov, and those senders and recipients ARE covered by the Public Records Law.
I spent too much time in MA while the guy was gov. I wouldn’t vote for him for dogcatcher.
Big Sis and others have the records.
I have even seen evidence that the RF spectrum is being “stored”. I saw an event where it was apparently replayed 2 weeks after an event and triangulated the source of a series of RF transmissions.
So much for privacy.
Presidential-hopeful politics aside for the nonce, I say that any elected GOP official that THWARTS, DFLATES AND DISAPPOINTS the Democrat National Committee, the Dem Party, the Dem TV pundits, that numnutz clown Duval Patrick, Obama, the Obama administration, the liberals, the leftists, the socialists, the communists....not to mention the panting, sensation-driven, corrupt media.....all in one swell foop deserves a massive round of applause.
Now back to all regularly-scheduled attacks.
Leni
RINOmney is an empty suit fitted with a voice synthesizer.
He is a giant nothing.
He is Obama without the blithering idiocy...but just as incapable.
Please, give him something he can do....like....er.....um.....
Well, just give him something he can do.
Not as president.
Hey, congress is a great place for folks who’ve never had a job and cannot do anything productive.
Why not there?
If that's what you mean, I agree with you :-)
That's probably one more than Zippy has sent so far.
Just to be fair, I wonder how the Globe would respond to a request for transcripts of their editorial board meetings. Not that they’re obligated to provide them but it would be an interesting moment.
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