JEFFERSON CITY – Gov. Matt Blunt’s fight to keep from handing over thousands of office e-mail messages escalated Friday when investigators threatened to sue to compel release of the documents.

   Chet Pleban, special counsel to the team investigating Blunt’s handling and possible destruction of public records, said he was making last-ditch efforts to resolve the matter. Unless the governor’s office stops stonewalling, Pleban said, he will likely file suit next week in Jefferson City.

   “If past practice (by the governor’s office) is any predictor, I’d say we’re going to have to file suit,” Pleban said. “I don’t understand the purpose (of the stonewalling). Maybe he thinks we’re going away. But we’re not.”

   Pleban’s decision came in response to the governor’s demand that investigators pay nearly $541,000 to cover the cost of retrieving electronic and other records going back to Jan. 1, 2007, and having legal staff review them to determine whether they are exempt from public disclosure.

   Blunt’s office issued a statement Friday defending the high cost of pulling together the requested documents. The office referred questions to John Holstein, a Springfield lawyer representing Blunt’s office and the Office of Administration. But Holstein’s office said he was out of town for more than a week and could not be reached.

   Pleban responded that the governor’s office had no authority to charge for complying with an authorized investigation into whether the office broke the law. Further, Pleban wrote in a letter to Holstein, there is no authority for one arm of government to charge another arm of the same government for production of records.

   Blunt’s office, Pleban said, should not be allowed to block access to documents by charging exorbitant fees.

   “The average person checking on their government doesn’t have the money, so they abandon the fight,” Pleban said. “That is certainly not in the spirit of the Sunshine law. That’s why (the Blunt administration’s) behavior in the course of this investigation is so vitally important to the public interest.”

   The fight over the records stems from revelations last fall that Blunt’s office routinely deleted e-mail messages, despite a records retention policy that requires such documents to be kept for at least three years. The information came to light during inquiries into allegations that Blunt’s then-chief of staff, Ed Martin, may have been doing work for anti-abortion groups on state time and using state equipment.

   In mid-November, after three weeks of revelations, accusations, policy maneuvers and wide-ranging demands for copies of public records from a variety of state officials and the media, Attorney General Jay Nixon appointed an independent panel to investigate.

   The investigation was fraught with political peril because Nixon, a Democrat, was challenging Blunt in the governor’s race. Nixon said he appointed an outside panel to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest for his office to investigate a political opponent.

   Blunt has since dropped out of the race. But he continued Friday to call the investigation politically motivated.

   “Even though Mr. Pleban’s committee is not independent of politics and Nixon’s campaign, this office has cooperated with it by providing hundreds of documents to the committee,” Blunt spokeswoman Nanci Gonder said in a statement.

   However, correspondence between investigators and Blunt’s private lawyer paints a different picture.

      Holstein, a former judge on the Missouri Supreme Court, was hired in early December at a rate of $300 an hour to represent Blunt’s office against the independent investigators. The panel is headed by Mel Fisher, who headed the Missouri Highway Patrol under Republican Gov. John Ashcroft.

   From the start, Holstein questioned whether Nixon had the authority to appoint independent investigators. Fisher and Pleban responded with, among other things, a Supreme Court opinion authored by Holstein that noted that the attorney general had substantial discretion.

   “If the attorney general believes one of the other agency heads is unlawfully executing a statute, he has the tools to act on behalf of the state to seek judicial intervention,” Holstein’s ruling said.

   On Jan. 3, Fisher asked the governor’s office for 45 categories of documents, including those involving record retention, public policy on producing documents and the office strategy of dealing with requests for access to public documents.

   Holstein wrote back saying it would take at least 60 days to produce the documents, but that they might be withheld for a variety of reasons, such as involving the purchase of real estate, the state militia, individual welfare cases, software codes, bid specifications or records involving domestic abuse hotlines.

   Pleban wrote back, saying the response was consistent with the dilatory tactics that the governor’s office had employed from the start of the investigation.

   “You recited each and every (exemption) without identifying the specific subsection which applies to the specific document that has been requested,” Pleban wrote. “Not only is that unresponsive (and violates the law), but it is patently ridiculous.”

   In February, Holstein wrote that it would require 2,924 hours to retrieve the documents sought by investigators. At $25 an hour, it would cost $73,100. It also would require 11,696 hours to review each document at $40 an hour for a total of $467,840.

     Plus, the office would charge for copying, whether onto paper of computer records. He demanded a deposit of $135,235 toward starting cost of $540,940. Additional costs would be necessary for research and copying, he wrote.

   Pleban scoffed, saying the charges equaled the equivalent of paying a full year’s salary to eight computer professionals just to retrieve records from the state’s back-up tapes of e-mail traffic, he said.

   Blunt’s administration frequently quotes prohibitively high cost estimates when confronted with requests to inspect public records. But the demand for more than a half-million dollars “kind of takes your breath away,” Pleban said.

   Holstein put together a chart showing that even if the money were paid, his analysis of the 45 categories of records requested by investigators showed that all but two categories might be exempt from disclosure.