The Dog Ate Their Accountability

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

 

Item: The January 6 committee wants relevant text messages sent by and to Secret Service officers for its investigation. The Secret Service says Congress can’t have them, because they were accidentally deleted — at least some of them after the committee’s request for them had been made — as part of a “device-replacement program.”

 

Item: In 2014, congressional investigators demanded that the IRS turn over emails to and from Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the agency’s corrupt program of targeting conservative nonprofits for harassment. From the Washington Post: “Lerner has refused to testify on the subject, meaning that her emails are one of the only records of what happened in her own words. The IRS has 67,000 emails from or to Lerner that it has or will turn over to investigators, but a large number, from 2009 to 2011, are apparently lost — a disappearance that quickly triggered skepticism, particularly from Congressional Republicans trying to figure out whether Lerner was acting on orders from Washington.” Lerner eventually retired with a full pension.

 

Item: A famous report from the New York Times: “Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.” As it turned out, Mrs. Clinton had deleted some 33,000 emails sought by investigators. Says FactCheck.Org: “The Clinton campaign previously had indicated that her personal emails were deleted before Clinton received a congressional subpoena on March 4, 2015. But the FBI said her emails were deleted ‘between March 25-31, 2015’ — three weeks after the subpoena. The campaign now says it only learned when the emails were deleted from the FBI report.” ABC News reported in 2016 that Mrs. Clinton was still “declining to address why those emails were deleted.”

 

Item: From the New York Daily News: “Most of former NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s emails on his desktop computer were deleted at the end of his tenure despite an order they be preserved for a high-stakes class-action suit alleging a summons quota system within the department.”

 

Item: From the Associated Press: “North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley said Friday in response to an open records request that the email account of former attorney general Wayne Stenehjem was deleted after he died and the account and former Chief Deputy Attorney General Troy Seibel was deleted after he resigned. . . . The revelation came to light when Wrigley had to respond to three open records requests about a $1.8 million cost overrun on the lease for the attorney general’s office when Stenehjem was in charge. Wrigley had to explain in his response why certain information was not available.”

 

Item: From Wisconsin Public Radio: “An attorney for Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told a Dane County judge that Vos had turned over between 10,000 and 20,000 deleted emails in response to an open records lawsuit filed by a liberal watchdog group. But the judge in the case said Thursday that there was no point in continuing to try to search Vos’ private email or phone for messages he may have deleted months ago. The open records case is one of three filed in Dane County Circuit Court by the group American Oversight involving Vos and the investigation he authorized into the 2020 presidential election. Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn is handling two of the cases. In one of them, she held Vos in contempt last week for ‘willfully (violating) a court order’ to produce records related to the investigation.”

 

Item: From the Detroit News: “Allegations involving deleted emails by Southeast Michigan officials could test prosecutors’ willingness to enforce a Michigan government records law that carries a misdemeanor charge, legal experts said. In one incident, which is under investigation by the Michigan State Police, Oakland County Commissioner Shelley Taub sent text messages to her colleagues advising them to ‘delete, delete, delete’ emails in anticipation of a request for documents about naming a new county executive. In another, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s chief of staff, Alexis Wiley, allegedly directed city employees to delete emails as controversy entangled the city’s efforts on behalf of a nonprofit organization.”

 

Conclusion: We need to put some people in prison and accidentally delete the key.