Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Twenty-Three

With each passing minute it becomes more clear that Matt Blunt and his administration engaged in a campaign of overt lying to the public and the press in the days after the Scott Eckersley story broke.  

The claim repeatedly made by Team Blunt that Scott Eckersley never voiced to them any concern about the office's non-retention of email records was fairly incredible to begin with, and now additional evidence has cropped up which make their claims even more implausible.  Both Tim Hoover and Jo Mannies have items up today that point at the revelation of yet another email which strongly suggests that Eckersley had piped up over deleted emails before he was fired.

Hoover excerpts in the Star one of two new emails that the Blunt administration turned over --inadvertently it seems-- to Scott Eckersley's lawyers:­­

“I seriously can’t believe this Sunshine Law story is still going. It’s absurd,” Bunch wrote, four days after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported
that the administration routinely deleted e-mails. “You have GOT to
find a way to get someone to pay attention to the actual statutory
language and kill this thing before it makes it through another week.”

A second email features former Blunt staffer Bunch referencing a legal memorandum that Eckersley had sent previously.  Needless to say, the discovery of these emails does further damage to the already tarnished credibility of Matt Blunt and his administration.

It's particularly fitting and karmic, I think, that on an issue where Matt Blunt's first and only line of argument was denigration of his accuser's "credibility" it is the Governor's reputation for honesty that has taken a hit with each successive effort at self-defense.  Let's tell it like it is: the Governor and his staff are liars --a point that is no longer mere assertion but rather a fact borne out by each new clue that comes to light. 

The regular contention of Blunt and his staff that Eckersley "never gave" advice on the retention of email documents has now been refuted by so many pieces of documentary evidence and third-party testimony that it can no longer be reconciled with reality.  This is, in part, why the Blunt folks are so desperately trying to change the subject to "save-every-email" systems and Sunshine requests of legislators. 

But a big problem for the governor and his team is that once you've strongly established yourself as a liar, changing the subject doesn't usually work.  People don't identify you as a liar only on Topic X, but as a liar in general who can't be trusted on any issue.

And judging by the opinions of Matt Blunt statewide, Missourians have long since adjudged Matt Blunt as a liar, whether it be over Medicaid cuts or something else.  The trust is gone, and, even if it were possible, Matt Blunt seems hell-bent on never earning it back.