Transparency! It is important that Our Leaders demonstrate its value within the Governing Process! Just ask Willard “Mitt” Romney, MBA, CEO, GOP. Reports Michael Levenson on the Boston Globe‘s Political Intelligence blog:
MANCHESTER, N.H. – Mitt Romney today briefly reiterated his campaign’s assertion that his aides did nothing wrong when they purchased their state-issued hard drives in 2006, as they left their jobs and Romney began his first run for president.
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“They all followed the law exactly as it’s written,” he said, after attempting to ignore reporters who peppered him with questions about the issue, as he left a luncheon here that was sponsored by the Union Leader newspaper.
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The Globe reported on Thursday that 11 of Romney’s aides — including his chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, and chief legal counsel – took the unusual step of buying 17 hard drives from the Massachusetts governor’s office, paying $65 for each one.
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The Romney administration also wiped the server for the governor’s office and replaced the remaining computers in the office as they prepared to turn over power to Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat. As a result, Patrick’s office, which has been inundated with requests for records from the Romney era, has said that it has no emails from the Romney administration.
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Romney did not address why his aides wiped the server, or if they were seeking to keep public information confidential. But he pointed out that his administration turned over paper records to the state archives in Dorchester.
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“We actually put 700 boxes of information into the archives that wasn’t even required, so we followed the law exactly as intended and as written,” he said….
Hey, reporter-peons, if you want to examine the “transparency” of Willard Romney’s only actual governmental service, you can just hoick your underling selves down to the State archives (if you can find them, and if they’re still open despite budget cuts) and look through 700 boxes of paper, sheet by sheet. Nobody promised you transparency was going to be easy!
As parsed by Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:
First, Romney had to announce he wouldn’t seek a second term, in large part because he’d lose and it would interfere with his ambitions. Second, he had to trash his entire worldview and adopt a new one that might be more palatable to GOP primary voters.
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And finally, it was time to deal with all of those emails….
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Romney’s campaign said the former one-term governor did nothing wrong and has nothing to hide, and all of those emails were erased because, well, just because.
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The consensus seems to be that Romney and his team did not violate the letter of the state’s Public Records Law, but it does seem strange that 11 Romney administration officials felt the need to buy 17 hard drives from the governor’s office for no apparent reason.
In the best GOP tradition of projecting their worst failing onto their opponents, Team Romney’s response to this challenge was to… accuse his successor of insufficent transparency and a want of attention to the spirit of responsive government:
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney’s campaign manager is requesting that the Governor Deval Patrick’s administration provide copies of any correspondence with several of President Obama’s top aides.
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In the report, Patrick’s chief legal counsel, Mark Reilly, said there was no electronic record of any Romney administration emails. A Romney campaign spokeswoman last night acknowledged that the hard drives were purchased but said that the former aides did nothing wrong. She also accused Patrick of “doing the Obama campaign’s dirty work.”…
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“As you know, state law strictly prohibits you and your staff from using public resources for political campaign purposes,” reads a letter sent this afternoon by Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager. “Under state law, a public employee may not provide services to a candidate or campaign during his or her work hours.”
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“Nonetheless, it is evident that your office has become an opposition research arm of the Obama reelection campaign,” the letter added, citing Reilly’s comments to the Globe…
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“At a time when unemployment is at unacceptably high levels, both here in Massachusetts and around the country, the people of Massachusetts deserve to know that you are focused on alleviating joblessness – not running a dirty tricks shop for your friend, President Obama,” Rhoades writes.
The next day, Benen added:
… Romney would have us believe his entire team grew attached to 17 hard drives — not the computer, not the monitor, not the keyboard, just the hard drive. This allowed them to eliminate untold thousands of email messages — a move with no precedent. What’s more, Romney’s team insists the officials “complied with the law,” but can’t explain why the purchases were made in the first place…
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The DNC’s Brad Woodhouse joked this morning, “Just imagine if Richard Nixon had been able to buy the White House taping system and walk out with it.”
I’m just hoping Charlie Pierce is right about Romney’s chances in Iowa:
There’s one thing that you always have to remember about Willard Romney. His jaw is made of glass. It always has been. When he ran for Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat, and the Kennedys started running at him like Kennedys run at everyone, he folded like a cheap lawn chair. He ruthlessly pushed out an incumbent Republican governor named Jane Swift, whom everybody in Massachusetts already had figured for a dolt, in order to run against Shannon O’Brien, who never was confused with Margaret Thatcher. Once elected governor, Willard made a lot of noise about setting up a statewide organization to elect more Republicans to the state legislature. A subsequent election showed this effort to be utterly futile, which is about when Willard gave up on really being governor and started running for president, which happens to be why we here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) have him to thank for inventing Obamacare. Thanks, Willard!
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Then, in 2008, he had everything going for him until every single other Republican in the field began to make it known that they’d rather scoop out their own eyeballs with a salad fork than spend five minutes in a room with Willard Romney. The going got tough and Mitt got out, and started planning for 2012, when Republican people might have forgotten how much they truly loathed him…
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The dithering in Iowa is the key to understanding Willard’s campaign and whatever vestigial soul he has as a politician. There is the fighting-the-last-war timidity. (Romney plunged heavily in the 2008 Iowa caucuses and, largely because the Iowa caucusgoers got a really good look at him, he pretty much bombed, losing to Mike Huckabee. So he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, dammit.) This made a little bit of sense if a) Mitt was going to run as the electable moderate he ran as in Massachusetts, and b) if his firewall in New Hampshire was in the satchel. The problem is that Mitt is (once again) kowtowing to the kind of lunatic conservatism that runs riot in the Iowa GOP caucus base, which has undermined the whole rationale for avoiding Iowa in the first place, turning the campaign again into his desperate attempt to prove his wingut bona fides. So he’s been to Iowa probably more than he’s planned to be, all the while trying to convince himself and the rest of us that a loss there won’t really mean that much. Now, though, if New Hampshire’s really in play, and I’m not really sure that it is, Willard would have himself a real problem. He’s pretty much got to win there by a touchdown-and-a-half for it to mean anything nationally. If he tanks in Iowa, and if Newt Gingrich stays within a field goal in New Hampshire, and then the campaign moves south, that would set up the perfect moment for the glass in Willard’s jaw to crack.
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Gingrich isn’t going to stay in butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-jowls Party Statesman mode for much longer. He’ll get the bends. And Rick Perry still has millions to blow on attack ads. If the campaign evolves to the point where Willard is both perceived to be vulnerable and is everybody’s target, you will see the pettiness, the whining, and the perpetual sneer at the lower orders that are all such fundamental parts of Willard’s personality, and that have endeared him so to the people in his own party. It is possible, after all, to lose simply because you’re afraid you might.
MattF
Well, it’s obvious that given a choice between “evidence” and “no evidence” a rational psychopath would choose “no evidence.” So… what, exactly, is the problem here?
jrg
That sounds like a lot of work. Can’t they just hire a panel of clueless beltway geriatrics to sit around LULZing about students getting pepper sprayed?
SiubhanDuinne
So what are the chances that Mittens will be asked about this at tonight’s “debate”? And what a tough event it promises to be, what with Wolf Blitzer “asking” the “questions” vetted, if not written, by CNN’s co-sponsors the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Yeah, no.
JPL
Rove is now working for Romney. How else to explain that he has to attack over lack of transparency to cover up his own lack of transparency. How else to explain that the President is going to personally attack him, the day before he releases an ad full of lies.
sherparick
I love the Nixonian double flip of adopting injured “victimhood” and going on the attack demonstrated by Romney spokesperson Matt Rhoades. Right of Trick Dick’s ol playbookd going back to his student council days at Whittier.
MattF
@JPL: Steve Benen goes into some detail on Romney’s flat-out lies:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_11/romney_offers_a_hint_of_whats033651.php
I suppose I’m not shocked, but I am actually surprised.
Dr. Squid
And while you’re at it, beware of the leopard.
Jennifer
Huckabee did pretty much the same thing when he left office – wiped all the computers clean. Of course, in his case, everyone knew it was to cover up the 10 years of grifting he had done as governor.
bjacques
@Dr. Squid:
I’ve no sympathy at all.
This would make a great crowd-sourcing initiative, at least for the emails that were not entirely internal. Anyone who received an email from Romney’s office please forward it to…
Even for the internal stuff, could whoever is/was in charge of IT plz send backups to…
The Other Bob
Let me break it to you, all Governors do this when they leave office.
Even if they are squeeky clean, nobody is stupid enough to leave a random e-mail around that would likely be taken our of context and lead to a lawsuit or bad publicity.
Further, every IT department in the country likely wipes a hard drive clean between users, no matter what position a worker holds.
I cannot blame them for taking every action, under the law, to erase files.
Peggy
OT- The patriotic case for a Romney presidency.
The US economy, perhaps with help from a Euro debacle, is either staying in the doldrums or will re-enact the Great Depression. Obama, if elected to a 2nd term, will never be able to get Congress to approve the financial stimulus necessary to save us.
Romney is a rational man who believes in business as usual. In the face of absolute disaster he will call for the Keynesian economic measures that will preserve profits and customer demand, otherwise known as jobs. The tea party won’t like it but they will go along because “he’s their guy”.
QED
The Bearded Blogger
I can see Mitt losing New Hampshire:
1) Losing Iowa to Newt
2) Douchebag reaction to losing Iowa from camp Romney (something to the effect that Iowa doesn’t matter because they are all hicks)
3) Mitt loses New Hampshire as his votes are diluted between true believers, “moderates” and paulites (in the live free or die state), something like:
Bachmann+Santorum+Perry= 20%
Cain!= 15%
Huntsman= 4%
Paul= 16%
Gingrich= 23%
Mitt= 22%
Of course, if HRC had a hard time admitting defeat, I guess we will hear quite a bit about super delegates from Mittens
The Bearded Blogger
@Peggy: Mitt is Wall Streets guy: he would go for austerity measures and “shock therapy” in order to complete the transformation from democracy to plutonomy.
Lady Rothschild will be so glad…
Downpuppy
On the plus side, the state archives are in a lovely spot on Columbia Point, a short stroll from Morrisey Boulevard.
jrg
@The Other Bob: This makes good sense to me. Storage (in the form of raw hard drive space) is cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Compare that to the unknowable risk of leaving something around that could be damaging… Even if Romney had no idea about it. Details on a staffer’s extramarital relationships? Email that could be taken out of context? Email that’s damaging taken in context? Objectionable photos?
If buying a few $65 hard drives eliminates those unknowable, and unquantifiable risks, just about any sane person would do that.
dmsilev
@The Bearded Blogger:
I don’t think the GOP has super delegates the way the Democrats do. So, we’ll be spared that at least.
If Mittens loses New Hampshire, he’s in real real trouble. That’s supposed to be a gimme for him, and if the only one of the first four that he wins is Nevada, well you’re not going to win the Presidency on the strength of Mormon votes alone.
Redshift
Applying standard Rove rules, it follows that what Mitt is hiding is using public resources for political campaign purposes (though that may not be all he’s hiding.)
If I were a reporter looking for a shortcut, I’d submit a public records request for all emails between members of Mitt’s administration and White House officials…
Xenos
Wow – this print-outs to the archives business demonstrates the Romney is several orders of magnitude more honest and law-abiding than W and his administration of RNC paid-for blackberries. As a Republican, Romney appears to be quite an underachiever.
Xenos
@The Bearded Blogger: Plutonomy? Under Romney we would head straight to plutocracy.
Peggy
@The Other Bob:
Bob- In Mass, by law, the public has access to those emails in their electronic form according to the Sec. of State.
The Commonwealth is not a private corporation, subject to the whim of its managers. It belongs to the people of Massachusetts, including me.
catclub
Is my understanding correct that Romney staffers bought empty
hard drives and then swapped them for valuable hard drives that had years of unique records on them?
I am with Peggy @ 20. You cannot get sweetheart deals to buy valuable state property because you know who has custocy of it.
The Bearded Blogger
@Xenos: I’ll see your plutocracy and raise you Morgan-Rockefeller-Rothschild-ocracy
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@The Bearded Blogger: Koch-crazy?
kindness
And so goes the GOP’s best hope for running off with the US State cutlery (and everything else that isn’t nailed down).
I would say I miss good ole Sarah Palin, but I don’t.
Hill Dweller
Charlie Pierce talking about Romney’s glass jaw last week looks damn near prophetic today. After his campaign started airing that horribly misleading ad, and getting push back, their defense is essentially, ‘Leave Mitt-ney alone!’.
The Bearded Blogger
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: awesome
DW
@The Other Bob:
OK, name three other governors who did the same thing as Romney. Should be easy if it’s routine practice.
Also while people in theory should be careful about official emails, practice is another matter. Look how much Abramoff and his cronies left in their emails. More recently, email evidence helped the Justice Department shoot down the Texas GOP redistricting program.
Of course that does mean the Obama campaign could consider shelling out to get all 700 boxes back into electronic format and put on the web. Then we could all judge.
4jkb4ia
@dmsilev:
No GOP superdelegates.
I was going to note the CREW lawsuit on the missing WH emails but I have to give Xenos credit for getting there first.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Peggy:
Today’s GOP are the ideological heirs (by way of the plantation culture of the southeastern US) of the 17th Cen. British Stuart Kings and their supporters and hangers-on. They are unreconstructed monarchists in all but name, and the crucial tell in that regard is that they think of the government as their personal property. Any attempt to regulate or limit their ability to dispose of their ‘property’ as they see fit is seen by them as an unjustified attack on their sacred private property rights and a gross affront to what they think of as their natural liberty.
karen marie
@jrg: You are suggesting that government officials should be exempt from the same kind of scrutiny that employees in private industry are subject to with respect to their work computers?
rikryah
Willard can’t help himself
Ken
“They all followed the law exactly as it’s written,”
Yeah, I beleive that’s Paterno’s, Curley’s and Schultz’s defense as well.
jayjaybear
It does bother me. Because those emails and hard drive records are NOT their property. They’re OURS. It bothered me when Bush did it. It bothered me when Huckabee did it. It bothers me when Romney does it. And it would bother me if Obama, or any Democrat, also did it. Presidential/gubernatorial communications, except for classified messages, are public property and should be available for any FOIA or evidential request made.
Erasing emails should be considered as serious as shredding documents.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@jayjaybear:
Actually even the classified messages are public property, just the special kind that comes with extremely strong restrictions on who can get access to it and how it can be used. Just the same as our nuclear weapons; they belong to the American people collectively but that doesn’t mean that I just can amble over to the nearest Air Force Base and ask them if it would be OK if I borrowed one for the weekend [I’ll bring it back! I prommmmmise!!]
brantl
@The Other Bob: No, actually, they don’t purchase their hard drives, you’re an idiot.
J. Michael Neal
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Great. We’re plagued by a bunch of Cavaliers with Puritan ideas about sex. That was the only ideological advantage the Cavaliers had.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@J. Michael Neal:
I’ve often wished that the Conservative Christian (so-called) blowhards who yammer on and on in their TV studios today about the so-called “War on Christmas” could be transported back to Cromwell’s Commonwealth so they could experience all the joys of a real war on the paganized Yuletide holiday we call Christmas, run by truly zealous Christians. It wouldn’t get them to shut the fuck up, but seeing them in the stocks would do my heart good.
The Other Bob
@brantl:
Thanks for the name calling. If they didn’t buy the hard drives, everything would have been put on a thumb drive and then the hard drive would have been erased.
Show me a state that keeps hard drives archived? You sir are the idiot.
The Sailor
@The Other Bob: You are incorrect. Preserving state records is law. Shredding documents isn’t.
Buy a clue.