JEFFERSON CITY | Attorneys appointed by a judge to take over a lawsuit against Gov. Matt Blunt filed a new petition today seeking access to e-mail records from the governor’s administration.
The new filing is substantially the same as the one brought by Mel Fisher against Blunt in May.
Fisher, a former superintendent of the State Highway Patrol, was appointed by Attorney General Jay Nixon last year to investigate the governor’s e-mail retention practices.
In January, Fisher requested 45 separate sets of documents — amounting to hundreds of thousands of e-mails — from the governor’s office. Officials first rebuffed Fisher and then said it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply with the request.
Fisher sued in May to gain access to the documents.
Cole Court Circuit Court Judge Richard Callahan ruled last month, however, that Fisher did not have standing to bring the suit and gave the attorney general’s office several options on how to proceed with the case.
Ultimately, the judge appointed two attorneys in private practice, Joe Maxwell and Louis Leonatti, to be special assistant attorneys general in the case.
Maxwell, is a former Democratic lieutenant governor; Leonatti is a well-known Republican who has worked for U.S. Sen. Kit Bond. Both are from Mexico, Mo.
They spent more than a month researching the case before filing their new petition this afternoon, a day before a court-imposed deadline.
Like Fisher’s earlier filing, Maxwell and Leonatti’s amended petition seeks access to the governor’s e-mails, asks that the documents be turned over to the court and asks the court to clarify several ambiguities regarding e-mail in the state’s record-retention and open-records laws.
“Our initial determination is that we’re in overall agreement with the facts outlined in the original petition,” Maxwell said. “We based our petition upon those facts.”
The amended petition also names Office of Administration Commissioner Larry Schepker and Secretary of State Robin Carnahan as defendants in the case.
Schepker’s office is believed to possess backup tapes containing the e-mails at issue in the case. Carnahan is named “by virtues of the fact that it may be determined that she is the custodian of records for the office of the governor,” the petition says.
The case is scheduled to be back in court on Sept. 8.
To reach Jason Noble, call 573-634-3565 or send e-mail to jnoble@kcstar.com.
Broken Chain of Demand
Wow, 18 months into this lawsuit, we get the names of the players and a judge who actually makes a ruling. That's about par for a Sunshine Law case.
The only reason this is still in the courts is because both sides are using public money. Those who originally asked for the records created a spin which generated a political vortex. The harm has already been done to the public.
Special prosecutors should clear the air on any past political posturing. If they don't address that, the only redeeming value in this case will be to point out that the law is ambiguous and that our government cannot "intentionally" violate the Sunshine Law, because they are the ones who make the rules.
BOBZILLA