Corruption In New Orleans Is Being EXPOSED! The TRUTH About Mayor Ray Nagin Is Coming To LIGHT!

The Times-Picayune
Editorial: What's New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's excuse? The dog ate my e-mail?
written by Chris Granger
July 05, 2009 12:15AM

For months now, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has said that most of his 2008 e-mail messages were "inadvertently" deleted from City Hall servers due to storage problems. Even now, he clings to that explanation.

But as New Orleanians learn details about the e-mail's disappearance, Mayor Nagin is sounding as plausible as if he were claiming that the dog ate his e-mail.

A team of experts hired by the Nagin administration to search for the mayor's messages concluded that the e-mail's purge was not the accidental result of server trouble. Instead, the Louisiana Technology Council said the mayor's mail box was intentionally wiped out by a tech-savvy person with "administrative-level access" to City Hall servers.

"It had to be a human action. This was not data that disappeared because of damage to the store or by accident, " said Christopher Reade of Carrollton Technology Partners, who participated in the project.

It gets worse.

The experts said the data removal appears to have included all of the mayor's e-mail messages from when he took office in 2002 until February of this year, when new e-mail servers began collecting his messages. The experts also said that out of 59 mailboxes in the city's servers, the only one that went missing was the one containing the mayor's e-mail.

These are worrisome findings that directly challenge what Mayor Nagin and other administration officials have claimed since February, when the city revealed the e-mail was missing.

In March, Civil District Court Judge Rose Ledet ruled that Mayor Nagin's actions were "not only unreasonable and arbitrary, but in flagrant violation of the law, " because the city ignored a WWL-TV request for the mayor's e-mail.

Considering that ruling against Mayor Nagin, one would have expected him to express surprise, even shock, at the experts' assertions that his e-mail was deleted on purpose. Many New Orleanians expected the mayor to express at least concern and an interest in finding out who deleted the messages.

Instead, Mayor Nagin criticized the LTC without directly addressing its findings. The mayor said Thursday that the experts were after "their 15 seconds of fame." He wondered aloud whether the companies had the expertise needed for the job, even though his own administration hired them. And he insisted that his e-mail was purged because of a server crash. In other words: I have my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The mayor even appeared to try to dismiss the whole controversy by saying, multiple times, that his missing e-mail has all been found.

"It just creates a little bit more doubt, but I think it's OK, " he said of the scandal growing around him. "Because we're going through systematically, and we're proving that the e-mails have been recovered."

What is he talking about?

According to administration estimates provided in Judge Ledet's case, Mayor Nagin sends and receives between 50 and 100 e-mail messages daily, or at least 18,000 a year. But the city has found only 129 of the mayor's messages from all of 2008. For the mayor to claim that's all his missing e-mail is preposterous.

What is clear is that the wholesale deletion of the mayor's e-mail broke the state's Open Records Act and city laws, both of which require storing public records for at least three years. Finding a fraction of those messages hardly resolves anything.

The most important question now is not how many messages were deleted, but whether there was criminal intent involved with the purpose of preventing their public release. Unfortunately, Mayor Nagin has made it his habit to evade answering such questions and to challenge the motives of anyone who asks him to explain something that looks out of order.

That's why a criminal investigation is warranted -- a point underscored by the conclusions of the LTC team. LTC confirmed it has been contacted by the FBI in connection to the experts' work at City Hall, and investigators need to aggressively prosecute any violations of the law.

Mayor Nagin also urgently needs to restore the public's trust. When the city first revealed that the mayor's e-mail was deleted, Judge Ledet called the administration's explanations "hard to believe." They are much more so now, and the mayor's insistence on his version of events in the face of evidence to the contrary is unfortunate.

That's why New Orleanians at this point have little faith that the Nagin administration will get to the bottom of this. But federal investigators should.