All Muck is Local: All The Governor's Men (Deleted E-mails in Missouri)

[struggle4progress]

By Diane Vacca - January 13, 2008, 1:15PM

One might say that Scott Eckersley did job his too well.

As deputy counsel to Governor Matt Blunt (R) of Missouri, Eckersley gave the governor and his staff impeccable legal advice. According to the lawsuit Eckersley filed against Blunt and other administration members, he told them they were violating Blunt's own written instructions, document retention policy and Missouri's Sunshine Law by deleting all their emails.

Since the governor and his pals were deleting emails to preclude the scandal that would likely hit them if they became public, Eckersley's advice was unwelcome, and since he was in charge of complying with the state's freedom of information law, he became inconvenient, to say the least. Ed Martin, Blunt's chief of staff, fired Scott Eckersley on September 28.

Things went downhill from there, according to Eckersley's suit. Shortly afterwards, aware of the threat posed by a resentful employee who felt he had been wrongfully dismissed, Blunt and his aides took the offensive by sending to newspapers packets insinuating that (among other things) Eckersley was interested in kinky sex and drugs. Eckersley asserted that the governor's staff had gone into his personal email account and sent unopened spam to bolster their defamatory claims ...

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