The State Department will announce a timetable Tuesday for the release of more of the 55,000 pages of emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton on her private server, writes NBC News.
The State Department is under court order to make the scheduled releases public. A federal judge has ordered that the documents be released on a “rolling basis” every 60 days.
Newsflash: Democrats are not always clean.
The New York state government ordered e-mails to be deleted during corruption probe.
The IB Times reports, in a memo obtained by Capital New York, state officials announced that the mass purging of email records is beginning across several state government agencies.
The timing of the announcement, which is following through on a 2013 proposal, is worth noting: The large-scale destruction of state documents will be happening in the middle of a federal investigation of public corruption in New York.
As IB Times reports, earlier this month in New York, a fire tore through a warehouse full of old government records from the bygone paper era.
Many probably felt relief in thinking that such records are now often digitized and therefore not at risk of being accidentally incinerated. Yet as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is showing this week, many records are vulnerable to another form of destruction: deliberate deletion.
“The Cuomo administration has now fully implemented a policy of automatically deleting emails of rank-and-file state workers that are more than three months old, resulting in an effective purge of thousands of messages in recent days, according to Capital.
“According to memos obtained by Capital, mass deletions began Monday at several state agencies after officials finished consolidating 27 separate email platforms to a single, cloud-based system called Office 365. It lets I.T. administrators purge any older messages, and can be set up to do so each day.”
According to Mother Jones, media outlets have been forced to sue to obtain even routinely disclosed information, such as payroll data.
Rather than release documents connected to Bridge-gate, pay-to-play allegations, possible ethics violations, and the out-of-state trips Christie has made while looking at a run for president, Chris Christie’s office and several state agencies have waged costly court battles.
As the 2016 presidential primary race draws closer, and Christie considers jumping in, his administration is fighting 23 different open records requests in court.
“The track record is abysmal,” says Jennifer Borg, general counsel for the North Jersey Media Group.
Her organization, which publishes The Record, has sued the state for public documents a half-dozen times since Christie took office. When a judge determines that the state withheld records illegally—which happens frequently—her group wins legal fees. As of September 2014, Christie’s administration had paid $441,000 to North Jersey Media Group and other media outlets for records. And that doesn’t count the cost of government lawyers’ time.
The fight has become expensive for the state because when newspapers go to court for these records, they usually win. But winning doesn’t automatically produce the sought-after records.
“We can and do beat them in court. But as long as they’re appealing—I don’t want to call it a Pyrrhic victory, but we’re not going to get the records,” says Walter Luers, an attorney who helped a transparency project run by the state Libertarian Party sue for public access for Christie’s travel expenses.
“Appeals take two to three years. We’re already into the presidential elections. By the time we get these records, Christie could have a new address.”
Christie’s reluctance to let these records go is understandable. On Tuesday, for example, The New York Times published an investigation of expensive trips, sponsored by donors and foreign leaders, that the governor has taken abroad. Some of those accounts were based on public documents that local newspapers obtained through lawsuits.
OK, Fine. 