I swear on my life, the dog deleted the email!
This isn't a shock. I mean, when you hire the guy whose company paid the largest fraud fine in American history as your state's governor, what else do you expect?
The e-mail accounts of Rick Scott and most of the governor-elect's transition team were deleted soon after he took office, potentially erasing public records that state law requires be kept.
Scott's team acknowledged for the first time this week that the private company providing e-mail service deleted the records as early as mid January, about the time the Times/Herald first sought transition e-mails.
Of course, this it's illegal to destroy public records, but Scott's team says it was just a boneheaded mistake. Their lame explanation?
Kise describes it as an oversight, the result, he said, of a chaotic transition run by a largely out-of-state staff still learning Florida law and unfamiliar with the technology that ran the e-mail system.
Ah, yes, blame it on the out-of-state staff the new governor hired to help lead his transition. Brilliant. (Except isn't Florida a big enough state that they could have found people who actually lived their to work on the transition?)
The St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald ultimately received 69 emails sent by then Gov.-elect Scott and 78 that he received. Those emails were retrieved from accounts that hadn't been deleted, but there's no way of knowing how many more emails will never been made available to the public—as required by law.