The following editorial appeared in the October 2010 issue of Carolina Journal:
RALEIGH — Reuben Young, former Gov. Mike Easley’s chief legal counsel, swore he knew nothing — nothing! — about either the governor’s private e-mail account or an order for staff to delete e-mails sent to and from that address. Not did Young pay attention to who was sending and receiving e-mails when he reviewed their messages as part of open records requests.
“I looked at the documents, one, to determine whether they were responsive to the request, and number two, whether they were a public document,” he said. “I did not look at them to determine where they came from.”
Young — who’s now Gov. Bev Perdue’s secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety — made this remarkable admission in sworn testimony. He was being deposed for a public records lawsuit filed by the John Locke Foundation and several state media organizations.
His spotty memory and parsimonious review procedures are, at a minimum, suspicious. The e-mails sought from Easley and his staffers would have concerned a host of issues that an in-house attorney would want to know about. Among them: flights and other travel the former governor got for free or at discounted rates from campaign donors; the $137,000 cash discount Easley received on a lot at the coastal Cannonsgate resort on Bogue Sound; and the do-nothing job at a six-figure salary Easley’s wife Mary secured at N.C. State University.
The State Board of Elections was plenty interested in Easley’s flights. The board fined his campaign committee $100,000, and issued a criminal referral to state prosecutors, suggesting that Easley had broken the law while in office. Federal investigators are reportedly looking into these matters as well.
To be sure, Young might not have known about Easley’s private account, because — as an earlier deposition from Easley Press Secretary Renee Hoffman revealed — Communications Director Sherri Johnson had ordered other press officers to delete any e-mails from the governor’s personal e-mail address.
Those messages could have been destroyed before Young had a chance to see them. Deleting those documents — or ordering their deletion — would have violated the state’s open records law.
But it’s ridiculous to assume that Young looked only “at the body of the [e-mail] document to see if it was responsive to the request,” as he testified. How could Young, who said he had reviewed public records requests from the beginning of Easley’s first term as governor, not be curious about who was sending and receiving the messages? Without verifying who was involved, Young would have had no way of determining whether he was reading private correspondence — which is not subject to an open records request — or public business, which is.
Young’s memory failed him on more than 30 occasions during the nearly two-hour deposition. On second thought, perhaps Young wasn’t channeling the hapless, fictional Sgt. Schultz after all. Instead, his role model may have been today’s U.S. military: Don’t ask, don’t tell.