How About This Document, Governor Blunt?

The Governor's counsel, Henry Herschel, has fired off another letter to Missouri's news outlets that again outlines the administration's incorrigibility on the issue of actually making public documents public.  From Herschel's hectoring, childish letter come these sentences:

Further, with respect to emails, our retention policy is similar to and perhaps superior to the of the attorney general's office: emails that are public records are retained; some that are not public records are not retained; others that are not public records are retained. [...]

Paper documents and emails can be public records.  But not all paper documents and emails are public records.

Since the Governor's staff has such a well-developed sense for exactly how to distinguish emails that are public records from those which aren't public records, perhaps they can explain to us whether one email in particular is a public record.  How about the email described in a recent story by Tim Hoover, Governor Blunt?

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­Eckersley replies: “Wow . . . I fired on people yesterday [ed. note: Septermber 19] about that
– I just got so sick of it – I e-mailed Chrismer and HH and Ed.”
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Eckersley said that reply was a reference to an e-mail he had
sent to Blunt spokesman Rich Chrismer, General Counsel Henry Herschel
and Chief of Staff Ed Martin.

As has been explained many times, an email of Eckersley's which Team Blunt has already provided (and which is excerpted above) makes reference to an email sent by Eckersley on September 19th on the subject of email record retention. 

Incredibly, the Blunt administration, which claims such aptitude for determining which emails are public records, hasn't answered the question of whether the September 19th email from Eckersley to Martin, Chrismer and Herschel is or is not a public record.  Seems like a pretty important question for them to answer.  Yet their position on that document has seemingly been to pretend as though it does not exist.

For a group with such a cocksure posture about divining the public or non-public status of records, Team Blunt sure has been squirrelly about taking a stand on an email that everyone knows exists. 

So quit avoiding the question, Governor; tell us --once and for all-- whether Scott Eckersley's September 19th email to his colleagues was a public record.

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