Editor’s note: This story was updated 10:27 a.m. April 18 with new information from Shumlin administration.
[T]he general counsel for the Shumlin administration asked the state’s tech department on April 8 to delete “all archived email” for five people who worked in the governor’s office prior to January 2013.
The employees in question are Alex MacLean, the governor’s former campaign manager and top aide; Bill Lofy, his former chief of staff; Bianca Slota, a former press secretary; Ariel Weingroff, a former scheduler; and Elizabeth Bankowski, who headed Shumlin’s transition team after his election in 2010. Bankowski is the mother of Sarah London, the governor’s lawyer.
The state archivist told the technology department the request was out of compliance with state law.
MacLean, who now works for the lobbying firm KSE Partners, was the president of strategic communications at Jay Peak Resort from 2012 to 2014. During that period, she worked closely with Bill Stenger, the president of Jay Peak. Attempts to reach MacLean on Friday were unsuccessful.
Federal investigators on Thursday announced a lawsuit in Miami District Court alleging that Stenger and fellow developer Ariel Quiros misused $200 million in investor funds for projects at Jay Peak Resort and the promised AnC Bio Vermont research center in Newport.
Shumlin spoke to reporters Thursday about the state’s role in investigating the alleged fraud. At the end of the news conference, the governor studiously ignored Paul Heintz, of Seven Days, who asked three times if Shumlin planned to release his email correspondence about Jay Peak, as Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder did recently in response to criticism of high lead levels in the Flint water system. Governors’ communications are typically protected under an executive privilege exemption of the public records laws.
London, the governor’s attorney, made the request April 8 to delete former staff emails, less than a week before Thursday’s unsealing of the federal lawsuit alleging the Jay Peak developers had perpetrated a “Ponzi-like” scheme that started in 2008. London did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
The Shumlin administration knew as of April 7 that the Securities and Exchange Commission would be submitting a court filing this week.
The Shumlin administration made a similar request to remove old email accounts in an April 1 email provided to Seven Days after the original VTDigger story was published on Friday. Scott Coriell, a spokesman for Shumlin, did not provide or mention to VTDigger the April 1 email from London making that request.
In addition, Coriell told Seven Days that the Shumlin administration “had been preparing for months for an expected filing by the state and the SEC.”
“We understand the secretary of state’s office now has concerns (about the request),” Coriell said Friday. “None of the emails in question have been deleted and we have agreed to take no further actions until we meet again with the secretary’s staff.”
“As it pertains to any records that exist related to the now-public litigation involving Jay Peak EB-5 projects, those records have been under a litigation hold for months,” Coriell said.
Records ‘of no archival value’
When London asked John Quinn, enterprise applications and servers manager for the Department of Information and Innovation, to destroy the communications of employees who left the governor’s office three years ago, he was unsure if he should delete the emails.
Quinn emailed State Archivist Tanya Marshall to tell her that he was complying with the request, but he had a question: “Can we do that?”
The answer from Marshall was an emphatic no. The request was “not in compliance with state law,” Marshall wrote to Quinn that same evening. “Destruction of emails has not been authorized,” she wrote.
That’s because the Shumlin administration has not yet filed a written policy for records retention, Marshall said in an interview. A records analyst is working with the Fifth Floor to develop one, but a policy had not yet been finalized as of last week.
Marshall and her staff have been working with the governor’s office for a year to determine what records, most of which are electronic, should be saved for posterity. London’s request to destroy emails came as a surprise to Marshall and the records analyst, Nick Connizzo, who heard about it from the technology department, not directly from the governor’s office, according to memos VTDigger obtained through a public records request.
Marshall said that as part of an effort to archive materials from the governor’s six years in office, the Shumlin administration needs to have a specific policy in writing that details how records are retained and destroyed. That written, internal policy has not yet been submitted to her office, she said.
When Jim Condos, the Vermont secretary of state, caught wind of the deletion request, he insisted that the Department of Information and Innovation should not delete any emails until his office has an opportunity to review the communications.
London in response promised to hold off until Condos, Marshall and Richard Boes, the commissioner of DII, could meet this week.
Coriell said the governor’s office was following the general retention schedules published by the secretary of state’s office that allow the deletion of routine email correspondence three years after a worker has left state employment.
“We’re obviously beyond that (three-year period). The only reason our policy would be different from the general one in terms of correspondence is … we’re planning to submit to archive staff emails to and from the governor,” Coriell said.
Boes said that “it’s a normal part of the process to get rid of things at the end of the retention period” after employees have left state government. Because the governor’s office doesn’t have an IT staffer, Boes’ department is taking care of the destruction of electronic documents, he said.
WCAX asked for copies of some of the emails under the state public records law, and Boes said he asked for a 10-day extension to fulfill the request.
“I don’t know why this is such a big issue,” Boes said. “We’re talking about X number of people and their emails. You’re picking up a story that people are blowing out of proportion.”
Coriell confirmed Friday that MacLean was on the list of email users whose communications were to be deleted.
To his knowledge, no previous governor has archived email, Coriell said, and correspondence between the governor and his two key staffers, MacLean and Lofy, has already been retained. Only “transitory” emails with little substance are being considered for deletion, Coriell said.
The records in question, he said, “we understood to have no archival value in staff accounts that are more than three years old.”
“That decision was based on direction we received from the secretary of state’s office that indicated routine correspondence not involving the governor need be retained for only three years,” Coriell said. “On March 30, the secretary of state’s office actually revised that guidance such that routine correspondence not involving the governor need be kept only until it was obsolete.”
