Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Twenty-Two

Puzzle me this: why are the media playing into Matt Blunt's hands by acting like his proposed system to save every email in state government would have made a meaningful difference in the Scott Eckersley scandal?

The Post-Dispatch editorial board called Blunt's shiny-object plan "welcome" and Tony Messenger referred to it as "the most fail-safe e-mail retention policy ever."  Both are working their way down the trail of beside-the-point breadcrumbs that Matt Blunt desperately wants them to follow and failing to ask the question that Blunt's strategy is just begging someone to ask...

­Is Blunt's fancy "system" really necessary when the emails from the governor's office, even deleted emails, are already retained on electronic backup tapes and stored by the state of Missouri for a significant period?

Matt Blunt and his team have rolled out a "plan" for email retention that tries very hard to make people think once an email from the governor's office is deleted by its account holder that it is lost forever and can never be retrieved.  But that is not the case.  Emails, even deleted emails, are retained for a period on servers run by the Office of Administration and are backed up to electronic tapes that are archived for months.

But Team Blunt wants to play make-believe and pretend that the current system is insufficient to allow them to retrieve emails that are relevant to the investigation stirred up by the Eckersley scandal.  Their tack is "Oops, we don't have any of Ed Martin's emails, Mr. Reporter, because Ed deleted them.  But this'll never happen once we implement our 'save every email' system."  The ploy is to make the press and the public adopt the errant belief that every deleted email has been lost forever to history.

Why do that?  Because they are tremendously afraid that a reporter will get his or her hands on some of the emails that Ed Martin or other high-level gubernatorial staff have deleted and their legal and political positions will be further compromised by what is contained within them.  So Team Blunt is pushing all its chips into the middle of the table on a bluff, betting that the media are big enough suckers to believe that his initiative is intended in earnest and simultaneously cooling any fervor currently held by reporters to seek out taped email backups.

The press may believe that Matt Blunt's "save every email" system is a good idea.  And maybe it is --who knows?  But what it most certainly is not is a necessary tool for retaining email messages, deleted or otherwise.  Sufficient technology for retrieving these emails is already there, and the state already has it.  The press just needs to look past the governor's smokescreen and insist that it be provided taped information the state is already storing.

Until they've done so and the state has complied, all the ink spilled about the importance of Sunshine and open records is just a lot of empty rhetoric.