When everyone else was blasting Hillary Clinton for her conducting government business on a private email account from which she deleted many, many emails, Democratic presidential primary rival Martin O’Malley all but abstained. Now The Intercept has shined a light on the former Maryland governor’s own questionable email practices.
Journalist Spencer Woodman was originally investigating whether a supportive letter sent by O’Malley to the FCC last year regarding the potential Comcast / Time-Warner merger had been ghost-written by Comcast. After Woodman’s requests for emails regarding the drafting of the letter turned up nothing, he referred to O’Malley’s own stated policy on deleting gubernatorial emails: his staff would regularly “purge” official emails (some of them on private accounts) from the system after holding on to them “for a certain number of weeks.”
O’Malley has said that his email practices complied with the law. But the law only allows for public records to be destroyed according to retention schedule approved by the state archivist. As far as Woodman’s investigation goes, no such retention schedule has been approved.
It seems instead that O’Malley was working from an interpretation of the law that “has never been publicly disclosed, explicitly authorized by the courts, or approved by Maryland’s legislature.” So there’s that.
