Republican Governor has state computers destroyed as he leaves office…. illegal destruction of state property? cover-up?
Huckabee left computers, fund gutted
BY SETH BLOMELEY AND MICHAEL R. WICKLINE
Posted on Friday, January 19, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/179261/
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee depleted the governor’s office emergency fund in the final weeks of his administration in part to pay for the destruction of computer hard drives in his office.
That left Gov. Mike Beebe, who replaced Huckabee on Jan. 9, with no emergency funds for the last half of fiscal 2007.
Documents that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, describe the destruction of the computer drives, as ordered by Huckabee’s office, and Huckabee complaining strongly about his cell phone and Blackberry not working.
A memo dated Jan. 9 from a state Department of Information Systems official to Huckabee told of the “disposition of data maintained” by the department “for the office of the governor” during Huckabee’s tenure.
“All drives have been subsequently crushed under the supervision of a designee of your office,” wrote Gary Underwood, the agency’s chief technology officer and a former Huckabee staff member.
Beebe has asked the Legislature to replenish the $ 500, 000 emergency fund, but a legislative committee has so far rejected his request.
On Jan. 3, the Department of Information Systems requested $ 25, 000 from the governor’s office “for the closeout of information systems for the office of the governor.”
Huckabee on Jan. 5 sent the department the last $ 13, 000 in the emergency fund, leaving an outstanding balance of $ 12, 000. The $ 13, 000 would be used to help pay for crushing the hard drives.
Department of Information Systems Director Claire Bailey said hard drives for 83 computers and four servers were destroyed, or “crushed,” after information was downloaded onto backup tapes. Underwood supervised it and delivered the backup tapes to Huckabee Chief of Staff Brenda Turner, who had ordered the hard drives crushed, Bailey said.
She said the computers were located in the state Capitol; the state’s Washington, D. C., office; the state police airport hangar; the Governor’s Mansion; and the Arkansas State Police drug office.
In 2003, Huckabee announced that after he left office, his official gubernatorial papers would be stored at his alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University, a private institution in Arkadelphia. He said at the time that the college would decide which documents would be released to the public.
A Nov. 20, 2006, e-mail from Huckabee’s director of media operations, Kerry Rodnick, to Turner asked, “Is there someone at OBU that could tell me how they’d like to receive our digital files ?”
With the emergency fund empty just before he took office, Beebe asked the Joint Budget Committee to put another $ 500, 000 in it. On Thursday, the committee rejected Beebe’s request.
An alternate resolution for $ 250, 000 to meet Beebe’s request halfway also failed.
Lawmakers said they wanted to know why Huckabee had spent it all and where it went.
Beebe said he’s not sure what to make of the committee’s rejection of his request.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Beebe said. “I hope that it’s not an inside political issue at the expense of taking care of emergencies and taking care of our people. The emergency fund is there for a reason. We just had seven counties declared disaster areas. We may have more. We’re coming into tornado season. That fund they usually try to keep, if at all possible, at $ 500, 000 at all times so that money is there for counties and cities and people if there is a disaster. I don’t know what they’re doing, but I’m going to have a visit with a few legislators and I’ll find out.”
Beebe said he didn’t know whether it was normal for the governor’s office computer hard drives to be destroyed.
“It certainly removes any opportunity to have any information,” he said.
Beebe has just finished a four-year term as attorney general. He said he knows of no hard drives being destroyed there in advance of his successor, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, taking office.
“Certainly [there were ] no orders for that by me,” Beebe said.
He said he did tell his attorney general staff to delete e-mails and other files from office computers in preparation for the new staff in McDaniel’s office.
Asked whether “crushing” hard drives should be considered a criminal offense of destroying state property, Beebe said he didn’t know.
Bailey said the Department of Information Systems arranged to handle computers during the transition in administration in the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices, but not the attorney general’s or treasurer’s offices, which are the other constitutional offices that changed hands in January as a result of the November election.
She said the Department of Information Systems didn’t crush hard drives in the lieutenant governor’s office.
“Some of our customers do crush and / or overwrite their hard drives themselves, and some of our customers ask for our assistance,” she said. “We, as an agency, always overwrite or physically crush our internal hard drives depending on the sensitivity of the data.”
A Huckabee spokesman didn’t return a message Thursday, and Huckabee didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking his response to questions about the computers and his use of the emergency fund.
Beebe said he wasn’t aware until recently that Huckabee had used the last of the emergency fund to pay costs associated with the governor’s office file purge.
Beebe spokesman Matt De-Cample said Beebe’s office now has 22 “updated” computers with new hard drives, 27 new desk-top computers, and 22 new laptops. He said the computers and other equipment were purchased with money from the governor’s office operational fund.
“We are operational,” he said. “We are not lacking in computers right now. We couldn’t run the office without computers, and we couldn’t make the request [to the Legislature for the computers ] until we were in office.”
He said that forced Beebe to dip into the operational fund for $ 335, 000 to buy the computers.
Bailey said the computers would likely have been replaced even if the hard drives weren’t crushed. She said that her department had replaced the computers at the governor’s office the day before Beebe took office and Beebe had to reimburse the department.
HUCKABEE EXPENSES According to the Bureau of Legislative Research, Huckabee spent the $ 500, 000 on 22 things, the most being $ 100, 000 for a group called Play It Again Arkansas “to purchase [musical ] instruments and provide operational funding.” Huckabee has been supportive of that group, which distributes used musical instruments to children. Among other things, he gave $ 10, 000 to the Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute to buy a car; $ 97, 000 to the Game and Fish Commission’s “Hooked on Fishing, Not Drugs” program; $ 10, 000 to the city of Little Rock to help in “the development of the Mexican Consulate” office; $ 15, 000 for the Arkansas chapter of the American Red Cross to help “prepare young people to deal with disaster situations.” Huckabee’s wife, Janet, works for the Red Cross.
Sen. Percy Malone, D-Arkadelphia, made the request at the Joint Budget Committee for a list of everything Huckabee has used the emergency fund for.
“I want to make sure it’s not a fund the governor has to use however they want,” Malone said. “If that’s what we’re going to do, we don’t need to call it an emergency fund.”
Kim Arnall, assistant director of the Bureau of Legislative Research, said the fund has traditionally been used by governors for “emergency type situations or maybe not emergency type situations.”
Arnall said the governor has another fund at his disposal, the Governor’s Disaster Fund, which amounts to $ 9. 5 million each year for things such aid during natural catastrophes.
Beebe’s request to replace the $ 500, 000 failed with 22 votes in favor, seven votes short of the 29 needed to pass. The alternate motion for $ 250, 000 failed with 25 votes.
Sen. Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, said he voted against the $ 250, 000 in hopes that his colleagues later would approve the $ 500, 000.
Rep. Bruce Maloch, D-Magnolia, offered the motion to give Beebe half of what he requested. He said later that it was not legislators’ attempt to send a “message” to Beebe as some at the Capitol thought.
He said he and other legislators thought that the emergency fund being depleted “really isn’t our problem.” But he said he also thought that it “isn’t Gov. Beebe’s fault either.” He said he wanted to “be fair” to Beebe, but he and other legislators want more information about the fund. He said Beebe may end up getting the entire $ 500, 000.
Richard Weiss, director of the state Department of Finance and Administration, said the emergency fund is typically replenished during changes of administrations.
Rep. Rick Saunders, D-Hot Springs, wondered in the committee whether Beebe wanted more emergency money to buy lighting for news conferences in the governor’s conference room. He noted that he had read in the Democrat-Gazette that Huckabee’s staff removed lighting which wasn’t state property.
A Dec. 28 e-mail from Rodnick, Huckabee’s director of media operations, to Huckabee chief of staff Turner detailed some last-minute sorting out of state property and private property.
“Gary Underwood and I met this morning and went through all equipment and communications related material to determine what belongs to the state and what did not,” Rodnick wrote. “We were able to define what was his, mine and the Republican Party’s.”
Rodnick noted that the conference-room podium was bought with party funds but “retrofitted with state money.” He wrote that one option would be deconstructing the podium to give the proper parts to the state and the party.
“The concern comes when the new administration comes in and notices the podium gone and the guts on the floor,” he wrote. “I feel it would be better to avoid potentially negative press by leaving the podium asis.”
Clint Reed, executive director of the state GOP, said he had no knowledge of the party buying items for the governor’s office.
As for the Department of Information Systems billing, Beebe said, “What I do know is apparently DIS never charged the governor’s office what they were supposed to over the last several years for the governor’s office proportional share of [information technology ] services.”
He noted that the state continues to have “big problems” with the way the Department of Information Systems has billed state agencies for computer services.
Last fall, Huckabee recommended that the state set aside $ 37 million of the expected $ 843 million state surplus to pay the federal government in case the state loses a lawsuit related to Department of Information Systems’ billing.
The federal government has maintained that federal dollars sent to the state wrongly went toward computer billing at the Department of Information Systems.
Beebe said the governor’s office owes a “bunch” of money to the Department of Information Systems for services provided in the past few years, but he wasn’t sure of the exact amount. He said Bailey would know.
Bailey said the governor’s office owes $ 33, 302 for services rendered during the Huckabee administration. She blamed “internal DIS billing process failures” for bills not previously being sent to the governor’s office. BLACKBERRY AND CELL PHONE
Huckabee also was dealing with other technological issues in the weeks before he left office.
“WHO THE HECK TURNED OFF MY BLACKBERRY ?????” Huckabee wrote in a Dec. 23 e-mail.
The Dec. 23 e-mail from Huckabee to Bailey concerned a disruption in the governor’s communication services during the transition to Beebe’s administration.
“My Blackberry has been disconnected by some genius who must have thought I quit being governor Dec. 23,” Huckabee wrote. “1. Who did this and why ? I’d like an answer now. 2. Get it turned back on. NOW ! I’ve called Cingular to try to get this fixed. We need to make sure our computer lines aren’t down. This is beyond excusable.”
Huckabee was one of the first people at the Capitol to have a Blackberry, a portable email and cell phone device the he has had since at least 2002.
Bailey quickly responded to Huckabee’s concern, writing that “I will take care of this now.”
Huckabee then wrote Bailey, saying that his cell phone wasn’t working either. “I want to know why this happened and who was responsible. It wasn’t very smart.”