TodayOpen records means open all records
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Article RatingIt’s no wonder the state House wants to exclude e-mails in any open records reform bill.
As the Post-Gazette newspaper in Pittsburgh reported Sunday, e-mails among elected officials and staff members in the Democratic caucus are giving investigators a detailed view of how bonuses were figured for employees who did political work. Those same revealing messages shine a light on the casual, business-as-usual attitudes exhibited by nearly all those involved in diverting taxpayer dollars to the illegal payments.
And make no mistake that it wasn’t business as usual. The e-mails in question are from 2004 and 2005. An internal probe apparently ordered earlier this year by House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese found that e-mails from 2006 regarding bonuses had been deleted, the newspaper learned, as had all of former House Minority Whip Mike Veon’s. That’s a smoking gun if there ever was one.
But some 31,000 message from the two earlier years were recovered. They are now part of Attorney General Tom Corbett’s investigation into the bonuses, which also extends into the Republican side of the aisle.
The e-mails contain everything from a spreadsheet that ranked caucus employees by the amount of campaign work they did to a query from one employee who found his name wasn’t on the proposed bonus list. (He was taken care of.) Others were sent out in batches to recruit employees for representatives’ re-election campaigns back in the districts, while some clearly indicate that individuals were working on taxpayer time, in their taxpayer-funded offices, on taxpayer-paid equipment to help the effort.
Meanwhile, those involved have tried to maintain that any political work was done on a strictly voluntary basis, on employees’ time. These e-mails should put that notion to rest.
It could be argued that if e-mails were open records, this behavior would simply have been driven further underground. That’s not the point.
Rather, this demonstrates how routinely e-mail is used in state government to get business done, whether it is in the people’s interest or not.
There couldn’t have been many people at the top of this scheme who really believed it was OK to use taxpayer dollars in any way, shape or form to advance strictly political work, even though, in the minds of many, it is impossible to separate the elected official from the election process.
But e-mail made getting the work done so much faster and easier, it was impossible not to use it, despite the risk involved.
E-mail is simply a form of communication. But while putting a match to a piece of paper can destroy damning evidence of wrongdoing, e-mail is pretty indestructible, as many in Harrisburg are seeing now. Simply hitting the “delete” key rarely actually erases an e-mail. And even if a sender or receiver’s computer hard drive is ground to bits, an e-mail can still be sitting out on a server somewhere, waiting for investigators to find it.
E-mail also tends to get the point. As these show, people will write things in an e-mail they’d never say to a person’s face, much less in public. Hence, an exchange of e-mails can give a truer sense of a situation than some carefully crafted press release, speech or formal statement. It can also be embarrassing.
The House is arguing vehemently that all e-mail should be excluded from open records reform to shield “privileged” communication with constituents. We argue, instead, that such exchanges can be protected as content on a clearly defined list of exclusions.
The form of communication should be irrelevant, particularly when it is one used so routinely on all levels of state government, for good or ill.
