The state Attorney General's office said today no charges are warranted against mayoral aide Michael Kineavy for deleting e-mail because he was just doing what he and other City Hall employees were told to do: Purge their inboxes every day because messages would be stored on a back up server - which turned out not to be the case.
The Dorchester Reporter catches up with the attorney general on her probe into the way Menino aide Michael Kineavy deleted zillions of e-mail messages. Doesn't sound like there's much of a there there, but possibly some lessons-learned sort of recommendations for updates to the state public-records law.
Five months after the Secretary of State's office concluded Menino aide Michael Kineavy "inappropriately" deleted e-mail, the state Attorney General's office continues to consider what to do about the matter.
"The investigation into the Kineavy email matter is ongoing at this time," spokeswoman Emily LaGrassa said today.
Menino's aide is still under investigation, but it seems like he was really missing his job too much to stay away.
The Globe reports Secretary of State Bill Galvin has ruled Michael Kineavy "inappropriately" deleted e-mail messages that should have been preserved as public records. He's referred the case to Attorney General Martha Coakley, who is no doubt relieved she won't have to decide what to do until after Nov. 3.
The city quietly posted a new batch of e-mail messages to Michael Kineavy Friday evening. Among the messages, a February, 2009 plea from Bryan Glasscock, director of the city environment department, for help in convincing Mayor Tom Menino to reconsider his decision to yank out all of City Hall's voice-mail systems:
The E-mail Archives of Michael Kineavy now has a second set of e-mail copies from the infamous old PC, the one Kineavy didn't remember getting replaced.
At least, the stuff they've found so far that hasn't been turned over to the feds. And as PDF copies of print copies, instead of raw text files, of course.
Here.
If you find anything interesting, post here.
Via Blue Mass. Group.
The Globe reports that Martha Coakley's office says it is now "involved" in Secretary of State Bill Galvin's effort to get City Hall to recover and turn over all those deleted e-mail messages.
Mike Ball reminds us of all the stories circling around Boston, most of which seem unlikely to affect upcoming elections:
The Globe reports Michael Kineavy is stepping down, at least for awhile.
That's the position city officials are taking on releasing the news that the reason they couldn't find several thousand e-mail messages from Menino aide Michael Kineavy was not because of some "glitch" but because, as the Globe reports, they were sitting in an old computer that had been swapped out from Kineavy's desk.
The Globe reports Boston will hire a company to "scan" all the internal City Hall messages to and from Michael Kineavy and then post those (so sounds like PDFs, although maybe they'll make it even more fun and post 5,018 GIF images). No word on the other messages, the ones the city claims would cost $250,000 to retrieve - or the messages that were forwarded to the feds.
The Boston Globe has made available a sample of the 5000 e-mails that City Hall finally coughed up related to Kineavy (these are e-mails from other people's mailboxes that included Kineavy in the To/From/CC fields not from his own mailbox, because he was double deleting his e-mails to avoid archival).
Particularly telling as to Kineavy's motivation for double-deleting all of his e-mail is a heavily CC'd discussion related to 2009 Saint Patrick's Day breakfast roast jokes. Kineavy ends the discussion with his colleagues by stating:
The Globe shows off printouts of the 5,000 extra e-mails the city managed to find belonging to Menino aide de camp Michael Kineavy; says it also found, gosh, some missing e-mails that might be relevant to the federal investigation into indicted ex-Sen. Dianne Wilkerson and her alleged liquor license issues. Says there are far more, but city officials balking at complying with the state open-records law say it would cost $250,000 to recover them.
The Herald, meanwhile, starts reading the messages and tears into Hizzonah for the way he released the paper copies of the e-mail:
Mayor Thomas M. Menino used classic stall tactics and flouted public records laws in the release of e-mails improperly deleted by his top lieutenant, making various payment demands and dumping the public records to reporters after darkness fell outside a locked-up City Hall. ...
Jay Fitzgerald considers the costs:
Some in the adminstration are apparently bellyaching that reproducing the emails is "cost prohibitive." Maybe if they had kept track of emails in the first place and didn't require expensive computer forensics teams to retrieve them, then perhaps the costs might have been a little lower, right guys?
The Outraged Liberal suggests a ritualistic solution:
If Michael Kineavy is as loyal to Boston Mayor Tom Menino as is widely reported, he ought to think about falling on his sword -- today.
Can you say "obstruction of justice"?
The "discovery" of more than 5,000 e-mails previously thought lost -- some related to the federal investigation into City Councilor Chuck Turner and former State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson -- adds a whole new life to what Menino has tried to dismiss as an innocent mistake by an overzealous clean freak off a top aide. ...
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