A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

2 January 2017

Montana must archive all official email, etc.

Some of Montana’s Democratic leaders are starting to look like fools on the issue of retaining emails and other official electronic records. Instead of insisting that the state fully discharge its legal and moral mandates to preserve these records, these Democrats are offering partisan defenses of the Democratic officeholders whose emails disappeared, apparently forever.

This morning, Lee Newspapers state reporter Jayme Fraser began her long, detailed, report on electronic records retention with this startling paragraph:

Not a single email is stored in the state archives, even though Montana leaders have used them to conduct state business for decades and state law requires emails of importance to be preserved.

For example, when Gov. Steve Bullock ended his tenure as Montana Attorney General in January, 2013, his email account was closed and his emails, evidently all of his emails, disappeared. Reports Fraser:

One month after a public employee changes agencies or leaves office, a state software system deletes all of that person’s emails. The automated system operates independently from records managers, typically meaning no one reviews the emails for preservation before they are destroyed.

The most high-profile example is the deletion of emails sent from 2009 to 2012 by Bullock and other Department of Justice staffers. It was discovered that no emails had been preserved when Yellowstone Club Founder Timothy Blixseth requested them as part of a lawsuit against the state. The governor’s office did not respond to repeated requests for the name of the department’s records manager at the time.

Deletion by automated default is irresponsible. In fact, it’s so obviously irresponsible that it may be less accidental incompetence than a deliberate attempt to hide official records from the public.

Democrats have reason to be defensive. A lot of records were destroyed — wrongly destroyed — on their watch. And many, I suspect, were destroyed deliberately for exactly the same reasons that Hillary Clinton attempted to destroy tens of thousands of emails: to hide from the public information that was embarrassing or politically inconvenient. Republicans do it, too, but since 2000, Democrats have controlled most of Montana’s elected executive branch offices most of the time.

Because Republicans tried to make political hay with Bullock’s emails during his successful re-election campaign, some Democrats now are treating electronic records retention as a partisan gotcha matter, not as a serious issue of public policy:

Several elected leaders, including Bullock and [now former] Secretary of State Linda McCulloch, expressed uncertainty about whether the current email management and broader digital records practices need to be fixed at all.

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McCulloch called enforcement premature.

“We haven’t decided what’s important yet,” she said. “If (records managers) are only doing a job a couple hours a month, things are going to slip through the cracks. Then who do you blame? The records manager? I mean, is that fair? … They take this very seriously. They do as good a job as they’re allowed to do depending on the time they have to spend on it.”

“It’s something we need to address,” House Minority Leader Jenny Eck, D-Helena, said. “I just hope we approach it with a problem-solving mentality, not as a gotcha.”

Eck wondered whether the email issue might just be a convenient political target for Republicans. Bullock said the topic came up because they want me “to atone for or defend what the practices have always been.”

“When I left the office of AG, my email account, just like everybody else’s that left, was closed,” Bullock said in October. “Yes, that effectively means those emails are no longer available. And that’s exactly what happened for every other employee there. That’s what happened also with Attorney General McGrath, Attorney General Mazurek, Attorney General Racicot, Governor Martz and Governor Schweitzer.”

When asked if it would be a mistake to continue to delete all emails of elected officials, Bullock repeatedly said it was not on his priority list to make changes.

Well, Gov. Bullock, why isn’t changing to a policy of records preservation by default a priority? What do you want to hide from the public — and why?

The priority for Democrats in the legislature should be defending the public’s right to know, which requires preserving records, instead of defending their irresponsible executive branch colleagues who are zapping electronic records.

Don’t cast partisan blame. Just fix the system. Fix it now.