Boxes of documents are wheeled into the Post-Dispatch

In 1993, former Attorney General William Webster pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally using state workers and state computers in a political campaign. He was disbarred and served nearly 21 months in federal prison.
A review of hundreds of state e-mails released last week as part of a legal settlement suggests that Gov. Matt Blunt’s former Chief of Staff Ed Martin may have used taxpayer money to pay for political activities by using the state computer system and a state e-mail account on state time. Mr. Blunt either knew what was happening or he did not. Neither explanation is reassuring.
The revelations about the e-mails, written by a Post-Dispatch reporting team and published Sunday, provide ample grounds for a federal investigation along the lines of the one into Mr. Webster’s notorious actions. It should begin immediately.

Ed Martin

The more than 60,000 pages of internal e-mails and other documents that were released last week to the Post-Dispatch, the Kansas City Star and the Associated Press depict a governor’s office transformed from the executive center of the people’s government into an arm of a political party.
According to the e-mails, staff members receiving state salaries to conduct state business on state time were working to advance partisan political causes. Among the efforts Mr. Martin tried to coordinate was a protest by anti-abortion groups against Attorney General Jay Nixon’s obligatory legal defense of a state abortion law. At the time, Mr. Nixon was expected to be Mr. Blunt’s political opponent in the 2008 gubernatorial campaign. Another of Mr. Martin’s projects involved using out-of-state lobbying forces to help “gin up outrage,” as he put it in one communication, to create political protests against the nonpartisan Missouri Court Plan.

Whatever the propriety and legality of Mr. Martin’s political machinations as Mr. Blunt’s chief of staff, the e-mails indicate that members of Mr. Blunt’s staff also engaged in a pattern of deception about how official state business was being conducted. This included making conflicting public statements that now have been contradicted by the e-mail record and communicating via campaign e-mail accounts in an apparent effort to avoid existing laws on open government.
Then, once news organizations filed suit to obtain public documents, Mr. Blunt’s office attempted to keep the information secret by trying to charge tens of thousands of dollars to furnish it. At one point, the governor’s office demanded as much as $50,000 from news organizations for the records.
The apparent use of public resources for political activity, the pattern of deception and the attempt to levy excessive fees for public documents suggests a cover-up that would constitute an assault on the people’s right to know.

The documents released last week raise a much larger fundamental issue: open government. Laws protecting open government are the single most important guarantor of democracy. Citizens have a right to know how their government is operating and to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. Without open government laws, they cannot do so.
Mr. Blunt’s administration has flouted those Missouri laws since September 2007. That’s when the governor’s office first was asked to provide copies of e-mails involving Mr. Martin. The misstatements and evasions began almost immediately as the governor, his spokesman and his press office claimed:
• That the e-mails didn’t exist. But they did; hundreds of pages were released last week.
• That the e-mails were not covered by state open government laws. As Mr. Blunt later admitted, they are covered, and they must be retained.
In one of the e-mails released last week, the governor’s spokesman, Rich Chrismer — who previously had told the Post-Dispatch that there was no law requiring e-mail retention — asked to stop receiving e-mails from a staff lawyer correcting that misstatement.
• That a fired staff lawyer, Scott Eckersley, never wrote memos describing the requirement to retain e-mails. In fact, he wrote several.

Aside from shredding whatever remained of the credibility of the Blunt administration, the 60,000 pages of documents underscore how important it is for Missouri lawmakers to strengthen our existing open government laws. There must be real consequences for intentionally violating the laws, including steep fines and the possibility of jail time for repeat violations.
Last year, state legislators proposed half a dozen revisions to the state’s open government law, but none of them was voted on by either the full House or Senate. Next year, legislators need to demonstrate that they’re serious about protecting democracy by enacting meaningful penalties.

News organizations also must continue to press for an independent review of all the e-mails and support investigations into allegations that the governor’s aides tried to have them destroyed before they could be made public.
Assaults on Missouri citizens’ fundamental rights to know what their government is doing and to hold elected officials accountable for their actions must not go unchallenged.