The controversial e-mails that brought down the administration of Missouri's Republican Governor, former GOP golden boy Matt Blunt, were finally released to three media outlets this week, and this past weekend the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post Dispatch issued their first stunning reports on the more than 60,000 pages of e-mails. The e-mails back up the claims of whistleblower Scott Eckersley, who said he was fired because he advised the Blunt administration to save e-mails from the governor's office workers in compliance with Missouri's Sunshine Law. The 22 boxes of printed e-mails reveal plenty of other hanky panky by Blunt administration officials, including extensive efforts by Blunt’s then-chief of staff, Ed Martin, to orchestrate with outside political groups using government resources while on the taxpayer's dime. The e-mails offer a fascinating and disturbing glimpse inside a corrupt Republican governor's administration doing its best to imitate the Bush White House.
The Blunt e-mail controversy started on Aug. 27, 2007, when Tony Messenger, then a columnist for the Springfield (MO) News-Leader, filed a formal Sunshine Law request with Blunt's office for any e-mail correspondence from or to Ed Martin regarding Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon’s defense of a new state law on abortion clinics. At the time, Democrat Nixon was presumed to be Blunt’s general-election opponent the following year (and in a case of sweet justice, Nixon was in fact elected Missouri's new governor on Nov. 4). Nixon was widely distrusted by pro-life groups, and Messenger was investigating whether Martin was trying to rally anti-abortion groups to bad-mouth Nixon.
On Sept. 4, Martin wrote Messenger that he had "no documents that were responsive — e-mail or otherwise" regarding Nixon and the abortion clinics law. But in a column published five days laters, Messenger reported that he had obtained one such e-mail from another source, thus proving that Martin had lied. That's when Blunt and his cronies began a series of lies and cover-ups that would prove fatal to Blunt's administration.
In the following days, Blunt spokesman Rich Chrismer insisted to reporters that "there is no statute or case that requires the state to retain individual’s e-mails as a public record." Blunt himself told reporters that his staffers would not be required to save e-mails for three years, as was widely understood to be state law.
But the newly released e-mails reveal that behind the scenes, Blunt's deputy chief counsel, 31-year-old Scott Eckersley, was in fact warning all Blunt staffers to save their e-mails. On Sept. 10, the day after Messenger's column appeared, Eckersley e-mailed his boss, legal counsel Henry Herschel, a passage from the state’s employee handbook that stipulated that "every record made ... in connection with the transaction of official business of state government ... shall be retained in accordance with Missouri law." In many cases, that means saving e-mails for up to three years. That's when things started going downhill.
(Eckersley) told his boss, Herschel, that the governor is "going around saying we don’t have an office policy" and that "I don’t think Chrismer gets it."
Later the same day, Chrismer asked Herschel to direct Eckersley not to e-mail anyone about e-mail retention policy, and Herschel asked Eckersley to go through him "before you start e-mailing people."
By then, governor’s office staffers appeared to be growing uneasy with Eckersley. A Sept. 19 e-mail from Herschel to an office employee asked the employee to call him and noted that "Scott looked at (the matter) but I’m not sure of him."...
On Sept. 24, Martin ordered locks on office doors be changed to keep Eckersley out. Officials from the Office of Administration sought access to Eckersley’s phone records and to the hard drive from his computer. On Sept. 26, Martin berated Eckersley face to face in what the lawyer would later describe in a lawsuit as a "profanity laced tirade."
Eckersley was fired on Sept. 28.
The new e-mails show that even on the day Eckersley was fired, Herschel asked another staffer to send him a copy of the Sunshine Law memo Eckersley had produced on Sept. 14 - correspondence the Blunt administration was claiming did not exist.
The next month, Eckersley went public in declaring that he was fired because he challenged the Blunt administration’s position that it did not have to save e-mails and could routinely delete them. Blunt denied the allegation, insisting that the firing had been "handled appropriately." The same day, Rich AuBuchon, the acting commissioner for the Office of Administration, told reporters that he could find no records showing Eckersley had advised Blunt’s office on the issue of e-mail retention, which the latest e-mails now show to be a big fat lie.
Blunt and his hacks proceeded to smear Eckersley in the press, claiming among other things that he was fired because he had viewed adult Web sites while at work and may have used illegal drugs. Eckersley has explained that the adult Web sites referred to spam he received in his e-mail account and that a reference to smoking "pipes" in his work correspondence referred to tobacco smoking.
The newly released e-mails back up Eckersley's claim that he was fired for reasons other than his work performance. The e-mails include ones in which Martin offers repeated praise of Eckersley's work. Just one month before Eckersley's firing, for example, Martin sent him an enthusiastic e-mail:
"Great work, Scott. You are a great part of our team. I am not sure I have said ‘thank you’ to you enough. I tease you a lot because I like you..."
The day after Eckersley's revelations appeared in the press, a yearlong legal battle ensued between the Kansas City Star, the Associated Press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the state Attorney General's Office to obtain the Blunt administration's e-mails under the Sunshine Law. (At one point last March, Blunt tried to claim that it would cost nearly $541,000 to recover and review e-mails from the archival system.) Early on in that battle, in November 2007, Martin resigned as chief of staff without explanation, and a month later Blunt got rid of general counsel Herschel. Then on January 22, Blunt stunned everyone in Missouri - including his key staffers and supporters - when he announced that he would not seek re-election.
The e-mails released last week also include troubling new details about apparently illegal activity in the Blunt administration that might offer other clues as to why Blunt knew he was sunk and decided to not seek re-election. The e-mails show, for example, that despite the Blunt administration's repeated denials, Martin in fact sent out e-mails from his state office account trying to stir up public opposition to AG Jay Nixon among anti-abortion groups.
Martin told Catholic leaders and other conservatives that Nixon, an abortion rights supporter, could not be trusted to defend the abortion law.
"We need to beat the living heck out of him," Martin wrote on Aug. 20.
Martin wrote Kerry Messer of Missouri Family Network: "Please help gin up outrage."
But Martin's political activities on state time went far beyond just coordinating oppostion to Nixon. He also worked repeatedly with outside political groups to try to oppose the appointment of Patricia Breckenridge to an open seat on the Missouri Supreme Court.
Several e-mails show Martin corresponding with members of the Federalist Society, a Washington-based legal think tank, to undermine Breckenridge, the only Republican among the nominees from the state judicial nomination panel.
In one, from July 25, Martin includes a short biography of Breckenridge and says, "We need to frame her tomorrow as ‘out of the mainstream.’ "
In a later e-mail, he criticized her for sitting on the boards of nonprofit organizations "that serve illegals" and jokes, "Yup, she’s a real republican alright — a mccain repub!"
(In one silver lining in this story, Blunt appointed Breckenridge anyway, which outraged Martin, as the new e-mails reveal.)
From his state office Martin also tried to drum up a movement to protest Missouri's current process for selecting judges. On July 27, he corresponded with a conservative activist about the need for radio and TV ads criticizing the state's judicial selection system, which puts much of the power in the hands of an independent commission.
Whistleblower Eckersley is now a graduate student at the University of Southern California. He has sued the state for defamation of character, wrongful termination, violation of whistle-blower laws and violation of the Missouri Sunshine Law.
Blunt will soon be out of office, but fear not. Last week The Hill reported that Matt Blunt is on a list of 20 "rising-star Republicans" who want a bigger name at the RNC . That's right folks. In GOP land, violating state law, lying to the public, losing the public's trust and resigning from the governorship in disgrace makes you a top candidate to lead the Republican Party into the future!
UPDATE:
As an added bonus, here's Blunt's unintentionally hilarious and totally bogus explanation to Missourians about why he decided to not seek re-election. It has all the classics: the need to spend more time with his family, the demure wife fixing her (loving?) gaze on him, etc. etc. (H/T Scarce):
Hahahahahahahahaha.
UPDATE 2:
There are so many juicy details to this story that it was hard for me to sift out what I thought were the most vital ones for this diary. But a comment by sawgrass727 below prompted me to add another piece to this story that came out last week. On the same day that Blunt's office delivered the e-mails to the media outlets, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported amazing new details about the depositions of two computer experts in the Blunt administration. They gave their testimony as part of a lawsuit filed by two bipartisan court-appointed attorneys who are acting on behalf of an investigation set up last year by Nixon (this is separate from Eckersley's lawsuit).
The two techies - Chris Wilkerson and Dan Ross - told state investigators that AuBuchon, Herschel and Martin had directly or indirectly issued orders for them to destroy computer back-up tapes that contained the e-mails being sought by the media and Eckersley's lawyers, although Herschel and AuBuchon denied repeatedly in their testimonies that they had ever done so.
Ross told state investigators that he had been told by AuBuchon in late October 2007 that "there was concern at a 'higher level'" about preserving the backup tapes that contained the sought-after e-mails.
The implication had been that the tapes were to be put back into a rotation where they would have been taped over by newer e-mails.
And it looks like Wilkerson and Ross are unsung heroes in this scandal:
Wilkerson and Ross have testified that they took action on their own to preserve some tapes beyond the standard 60 days, in order to keep intact the e-mails sought by open-records requests. Herschel testified that he was angered by their action because approval had not been sought and he and other top administration officials had not been made aware of it.
Hooray for the geeks!