More than just an 18-and-a-half minute gap.
Is this the kind of cover-up capability we can expect from a Romney administration?
"Romney staffers wiped out records in ’06; Ex-governor’s aides say they did nothing wrong" November 17, 2011|By Michael Levenson and Matt Viser, Globe Staff
Just before Mitt Romney left the Massachusetts governor’s office and first ran for president, 11 of his top aides purchased their state-issued computer hard drives, and the Romney administration’s e-mails were all wiped from a server, according to interviews and records obtained by the Globe.
Romney administration officials had the remaining computers in the governor’s office replaced just before Governor Deval Patrick’s staff showed up to take power in January 2007, according to Mark Reilly, Patrick’s chief legal counsel.
As a result, Patrick’s office, which has been bombarded with inquiries for records from the Romney era, has no electronic record of any Romney administration e-mails, Reilly said.
“The governor’s office has found no e-mails from 2002-2006 in our possession,’’ Reilly said in a statement. “Before the current administration took office, the computers used during that time period were replaced and the server used during that time period was taken out of service, all files were removed from it, and it was also replaced.’’
Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, said the governor’s aides did nothing wrong.
“In leaving office, the governor’s staff complied with the law and longtime executive branch practice,’’ she said. “Some employees exercised the option to purchase computer equipment when they left. They did so openly with personal checks.’’
She accused Patrick of “doing the Obama campaign’s dirty work’’ and called it one in a series of “political attacks to distract from Obama’s horrible record on jobs.’’ Patrick, a Democrat, is a close friend and supporter of President Obama, and is expected to play a prominent role in his reelection campaign.
That's what politics is.
Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who oversees the state Public Records Law, said it appeared odd that state property - in this case, hard drives - was essentially being sold to private individuals.
“I don’t sell things to people who work for me,’’ said Galvin, a Democrat. “I’ve heard of people getting their chair or something as a gift. But generally if you work for me you don’t take your laptop with you when you leave.’’
Galvin pointed out that, in 1997, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that “the governor is not explicitly included’’ in the Public Records Law. He said that means that e-mails don’t have to be released to the public, but the governor’s office still has to preserve them and turn them over to the state archivist.
Then they BROKE the LAW, didn't they?
“They have an obligation as a public official to preserve their records,’’ Galvin said. “Electronic records are held to the same standard as paper records. There’s no question. They’re not in some lesser standard.’’
Officials from the two prior administrations, of governors Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift, could not be reached last night, leaving it unclear whether their aides took similar actions regarding hard drives, e-mails, and computer servers.
Just before leaving office, Romney’s staff went before the Records Conservation Board, which is made up of appointees from various state agencies and reviews public record retention. In some cases, the Romney administration was given permission to destroy records, Galvin said, oftentimes because they were redundant.
“I know that all of the Romney materials were dealt with by the public records board,’’ Galvin said. “That doesn’t mean that what was portrayed to the records board was a complete and accurate summary. I don’t know that.’’
Mark Nielsen, who was Romney’s chief legal counsel, bought his hard drive on Dec. 12, 2006, just over two weeks before Patrick administration officials took over the governor’s office.
“The longstanding practice in the governor’s office was to give employees the option to buy old equipment when they were leaving office, and certain employees, including me, did that,’’ Nielsen told the Globe. “But those purchases were in conformance with the law and with longstanding executive branch practice.’’
“I’m confident that we complied with the letter and the spirit of the law,’’ he added. When asked why he would want to purchase his hard drive, he said, “Employees were given that option and it was my understanding that it was a longstanding practice in the governor’s office.’’
When they start talking like that you know they did something wrong.
When asked about replacing the remaining computers and wiping the server clean, he said, “All I can tell you is we fully complied with the law and complied with longstanding executive branch practice. Nothing unusual was done.’’
Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, said Romney administration officials may not have violated the letter of the state Public Records Law, but may have run afoul of its spirit.
“Information that was generated in the administration belongs to the people of the Commonwealth, unless it was personal in nature,’’ she said. “There is a place for purchasing of surplus property, but there are procedures to do that. And it seems that we are, as a Commonwealth, losing something if all records were deleted.’’
Yeah, WE PAID FOR IT!
All told, 11 Romney administration officials bought 17 hard drives from the governor’s office, paying $65 for each one, according to copies of canceled checks that they wrote and members of the current administration. Many of the aides wrote “equipment’’ or “hard drives’’ in the memo space on their checks.
Beth E. Myers, who was Romney’s chief of staff, bought her hard drive on Aug. 18, 2006, the same month that she left state employment.
She later became Romney’s campaign manager.
Peter G. Flaherty, who was Romney’s deputy chief of staff, bought the hard drive from his computer on Nov. 3, 2006, four days before Patrick was elected, defeating his Republican opponent, Kerry Healey, who was Romney’s lieutenant governor. Flaherty later became the Romney campaign’s chief liaison to social conservatives.
Sure looks like they were COVERING THEIR TRACKS!
The rest of the hard drives were bought in November and December of 2006 by other aides.
While Patrick aides said they do not have any electronic records of Romney administration e-mails, Galvin said there are 700 to 800 boxes of paper records from the Romney era at the state archives in Boston.
In 2009, Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston was embroiled in controversy after one of his top aides, Michael J. Kineavy, acknowledged that he had deleted nearly every e-mail he sent or received over the previous five years.
The law requires municipal employees to preserve e-mails for at least two years, even if they have “no informational or evidential value,’’ and provides for penalties of up to a year in jail.
A nine-month investigation by Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office concluded, however, that the destruction of the e-mails was not a crime because Kineavy was not willfully attempting to hide the correspondence from the public.
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"Past staffs recall no computer buybacks; Romney’s predecessors’ aides say removal was not standard practice" November 18, 2011|By Matt Viser and Michael Levenson, Globe Staff
Top aides to the three Massachusetts governors who preceded Mitt Romney - all of them Republicans - said yesterday they know of no instance when state employees purchased their computer hard drive as they left the administration, as 11 of Romney’s aides did in 2006 as he was laying the groundwork for his first presidential campaign.
So it IS NOT LONGSTANDING PRACTICE, 'eh?
The aides from the administrations of William F. Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Jane Swift all said they were not aware of such purchases being made previously.
“I don’t remember anybody buying their hard drives. I don’t remember anybody buying anything,’’ said Stephen P. Crosby, who worked for Romney’s two predecessors and handled the transition between Jane Swift’s outgoing administration and Romney’s incoming one, and who was also co-chairman of Governor Deval Patrick’s budget and finance transition team. “I can’t even remember anybody discussing it. It certainly wasn’t [standard operating procedure] in any way. That’s almost unthinkable. It seems inherently a bad idea. You almost think you’d want to have a record of everything going on for the public.’’
Terry Dolan, who worked in six administrations and handled office transfers for many of them, said it was rare for departing employees to purchase state property - and unheard of for them to purchase computer equipment.
“That had not happened prior to the end of the Romney administration,’’ said Dolan, who worked as director of administration in the governor’s office from 1985 to 2008. But Dolan said Romney’s staff was “careful and methodical’’ and “so we acceded to that request’’ for the purchase of hard drives. “I can’t conceive that they would have done anything that was illegal,’’ she said.
I can.
The Globe reported yesterday that 11 of Romney’s aides purchased their state-issued hard drives and wiped e-mails from the server at the end of Romney’s term in 2006. As a result, according to Patrick’s legal counsel, no records have been found of any e-mails sent during Romney’s four-year term. A spokeswoman for Romney’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination acknowledged that the hard drives were purchased but said that the former aides did nothing wrong and had “complied with the law and longtime executive branch practice.’’
That's a lie.
The Romney campaign yesterday declined requests to explain why the hard drives were purchased, leaving it unclear whether they were trying to keep information confidential. Nor did the campaign respond to questions about whether Romney had used a computer that contained one of the purchased hard drives. His former special assistant, Natalie Crate, purchased three hard drives but it is unclear whose she purchased. Crate did not return messages seeking comment.
The Romney campaign yesterday responded to the disclosure by filing a request under the state’s public records law for information about contacts between the office of Patrick, a Democrat, and the campaign of President Obama. Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, wrote to the Patrick administration yesterday that “Under state law, a public employee may not provide services to a candidate or campaign during his or her work hours … It is evident that your office has become an opposition research arm of the Obama reelection campaign.’’
Patrick’s chief legal counsel, Mark Reilly, said the administration would meet the request. “We have fulfilled over 250 public records requests in our five years in office, and we will be happy to fulfill this one,’’ he said in a statement.
In addition to the purchase by 11 aides of 17 hard drives at $65 each before Romney left office, Romney administration officials also wiped clean computers and servers that contained electronic copies of emails in the governor’s office.
Dolan, who was part of several administrations, said it was common practice to scrub the computer servers, and the computers themselves, as administrations switched staffs - and also, in some instances, when new Cabinet members joined the administration.
But it was a first, she said, when Romney was preparing to leave office and aides began looking into buying their entire computers, which would have cost about $1,100 apiece, before settling on just buying a $65 hard drive.
“When it came right down to it, people weren’t interested in the box, the monitor, the keyboard, the entire PC,’’ Dolan said. “It was just the hard drive.’’
As a result, she said, the hard drives were removed, and new ones were inserted and left inside the old computer equipment, ready for the Patrick administration to use....
But they are not trying to hide anything.
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Related: Romney backs aides on '06 purchase of hard drives
Also related:
"Economist says Romney ‘lying’ remark too harsh" November 18, 2011|By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff
Jonathan Gruber, the economist who was a key consultant on both the Massachusetts and national health care overhauls, said yesterday he went too far in an interview this week by saying Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is “lying’’ when he tries to draw sharp distinctions between the two laws.
Must be a qualification for the office.
But he stood by his basic criticism that the former governor has been misleading in remarks trying to put distance between the substance of the national and Massachusetts overhauls.
“I’d like to walk back the ‘lying’ statement because Mitt Romney, as far as I know, has not actually lied,’’ Gruber said in a Globe interview following his comments published in Capital New York on Wednesday. “He’s just been disingenuous and purposely misleading… . I did go too far in that statement.’’
That smells like lying to me.
“By that I mean, when he says we did it in Massachusetts without raising taxes while President Obama’s law raised taxes, he knows the reason Massachusetts could do it is that the feds picked up much of the cost of the Massachusetts law,’’ said Gruber, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So it’s completely misleading.’’
The 2006 law is the signature achievement of Romney’s single term as governor. Romney’s campaign did not issue a formal response to a Globe request for comment.
Gruber provided advice and econometric models to support the benefit of the so-called individual mandate that individuals who could afford it purchase health insurance or face penalties as part of both statutes. That mandate is at the center of legal challenges that the US Supreme Court will take up next year.
In the Capital New York interview, Gruber said, “I’m frustrated that the future of the American health care system rests in the hands of one or two of these unelected people who might make the decision based on political grounds.’’
During that interview, he also said of Romney’s efforts to draw distinctions: “The problem is there is no way to say that. Because they’re the same [expletive] bill. He just can’t have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it’s the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he’s just lying. The only big difference is he didn’t have to pay for his. Because the federal government paid for it. Where at the federal level, we have to pay for it, so we have to raise taxes.’’
In the Globe interview, Gruber acknowledged differences in the two laws but said the core principles are the same.
“In terms of what the bills do to cover the uninsured, they’re pretty much the same,’’ he said. “Any differences between them are not substantive. But in terms of the rest of the federal bill, it’s much more ambitious than what we did in Massachusetts.’’
“In Massachusetts, we didn’t take on cost control, and the federal law does,’’ Gruber said.
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Also see: Grubby Gruber
Maybe Romney is sick:
"Romney calls for cuts in Medicaid" November 22, 2011|By Shira Schoenberg, Globe Correspondent
NASHUA - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney yesterday called on Congress to take money from Medicaid, not defense, to compensate for the failure of the congressional supercommittee to agree on deficit reductions....
Un-flipping-real!!!
Related: Nominating Romney Means Return of Bush
I feel like he never left.
Romney called on President Obama to introduce legislation to rescind the defense cuts and take the money from elsewhere in the budget, potentially from Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for the poor....
Working on it: Worship War Day: Pentagon Cries Poverty
Mitt will never want for care, will he?
Romney spoke at BAE Systems....
Talking to employees of one of the country’s largest defense contractors, Romney criticized Obama for not doing enough to support the military....
“The president has shown only a willingness to cut military spending,’’ Romney said. “His answer to a government that’s too big is to keep cutting the military. And this at a time when the world has become more dangerous. It is unacceptable.’’
Obama has actually increased the defense budget.
And he wonders why his poll numbers are tanking.
According to the Associated Press, when Obama took office, the defense budget was $513 billion plus $153 billion in spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the budget year that ended Sept. 30, the defense budget was $530 billion plus $159 billion in war spending....
Actually, I read that the budget was more like $926 billion, so WTF?
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And it's not only Medicaid that will get the Romney razor:
"Romney’s Medicare plan short on details; Partial privatization seen as bold, vague" by Tracy Jan | Globe Staff, November 26, 2011
WASHINGTON - Mitt Romney’s ambitious plan to rein in federal Medicare spending would give America’s seniors a choice: choose government insurance or use a federal voucher to buy medical insurance from private companies. The idea, according to Romney, is to drive down costs by introducing market competition.
The proposal is similar in some respects to the plan Romney introduced as governor of Massachusetts and partially borrows from ideas pursued by Republicans in Congress and floated by a bipartisan group in Washington.
But while Romney’s partial privatization route is applauded by some as a courageous solution to runaway costs, Democrats and some other critics say that it relies too heavily on unreliable market forces to lower costs....
If Romney wins the Republican nomination, his plan promises to become a major issue in the general election against President Obama. Obama’s forces have begun characterizing Romney’s solution as a bid to dismantle Medicare, even though it contains concepts that have been backed by some Democrats....
Romney’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for details and comment....
Romney gets credit from deficit hawks for taking on an entitlement program with costs that will skyrocket as legions of baby boomers reach the age of 65....
Not an ENTITLEMENT!
The AMERICAN PEOPLE have PAID TAXES for THOSE SERVICES!
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Also see: Boomers Retirement Goes Bust
"Republican debate heats up on limits of US security; Gingrich takes immigration stance" by Matt Viser and Tracy Jan | Globe Staff, November 22, 2011
WASHINGTON - The Republican presidential candidates clashed last night - at times vigorously - over their visions for American security, whether Muslims should be targeted for extra screenings at airports, and how precipitously the US military should pull out from Afghanistan.
Several candidates argued forcefully that the Patriot Act, which made it easier for authorities to track Internet traffic and tap phones in the United States, should not only remain in place, but be strengthened. If preventing future attacks means occasionally infringing on civil liberties, they said, so be it.
“There is crime. And then there is war,’’ Romney said. “We need tools when war is waged domestically to assure that as the president of United States you can fulfill your responsibility which is to protect the life, liberty, and property of American citizens and defend them from foes domestic and foreign.’’
So when are you going to start rounding up the Israeli spies or the Bush war criminals?
Oh, right. If he wins the Bush people are back in.
****************
More than most other Republicans in the field, Romney has emphasized foreign policy, traveling abroad earlier this year, revealing a lengthy list of advisers, and delivering a major address on foreign policy last month....
Some of the debate’s lighter moments involved candidates not recalling first names.
During Romney’s introduction, he said, “I’m Mitt Romney and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.’’ (It may have been the first fact-check of the two-hour debate: Romney’s given first name is Willard.)
What the web cut from the printed piece:
"Romney said his first trip, if elected, would be to Israel"
That pretty much cinches the nomination for him.
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