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Tech expert: Nagin e-mails disappeared

By BECKY BOHRER, Associated Press Writer - Thu Jul 2, 2009 11:36AM EDT

NEW ORLEANS - A technology expert said Wednesday that potentially years' worth of Mayor Ray Nagin's e-mails have been deleted.

Christopher Reade, a partner in a tech firm who assisted the Louisiana Technology Council in efforts to recover data for the mayor's office, said the mailbox was removed between June 2008 and May 2009. He said 22 gigabytes of data vanished from a defunct server on May 5 — the day of a conference call with the city on the work the outside technology experts would do — but he did not know if the mailbox was among that data.

City technology chief M. Harrison Boyd, who came on board last summer, said he was shocked. He said controls put in place in March would have made it "virtually impossible" to delete any information in May.

Boyd questioned whether the job was too big for the group to handle, adding, "Until I have the opportunity to review their methodology, I would strongly encourage them to step back."

The city blamed a faulty server for not being able to produce more records sought by WWL-TV. The station sued earlier this year over its request for Nagin's 2008 calendar and e-mails from July-through-December 2008. An attorney for WWL-TV, Mary Ellen Roy, said the calendar was turned over, and about 150 e-mails were discovered.

The mayor, as part of the lawsuit, was said to receive 50 to 100 e-mails a day and to send up to five.

The Technology Council, according to city spokesman James Ross, was hired to determine if there were additional e-mails. Boyd said the group was brought in at his suggestion to provide an independent, third-party review — and given full access to city servers.

The Technology Council hopes to finish its work — including trying to recover the mayor's mailbox — within the next week or two, said the group's president, Mark Lewis.

Last week, federal authorities confirmed a criminal investigation involving the city's technology office, crime camera contracts and "related matters" that U.S. Attorney Jim Letten has refused to specify. Investigators last month carried out what Letten and the local FBI Special Agent in Charge David Welker called "court-ordered searches and seizures of stored computer information at City Hall."

The technology office has been the subject of two scathing reports — one by New Orleans' inspector general's office, another city-commissioned — with its handling of contracts and the problem-plagued crime camera program a key focus. The inspector general's report, released in March, noted that Boyd had taken steps to begin addressing some of the problems it found but also said more work was needed to guard against future cost overruns and performance failures.

The technology department also has gotten embroiled in a dispute involving the release of City Council e-mails. The city attorney has said the local sanitation director got CDs of council e-mails from the office and released them — without the legal vetting that protocol dictates — to an attorney who had requested them.

Nagin told WVUE-TV last week that "all" his e-mails had been recovered from his desktop computer and that "there's really no secrets as it relates to my activities." He said there was nothing that federal authorities had spoken with him about directly.

Reade said the disappearance of Nagin's e-mails could not be attributed to server damage that the city says occurred in June 2008, saying Nagin's box appeared to be the only one of dozens of City Hall staffers to have gone missing. He said the missing e-mails could date back several years. Nagin was first elected in 2002.

Reade said he believes it took a "technically competent human action" to remove the box. "The average person, even the average techie, would not know how to do that," he said.

State law calls for maintaining records for at least three years.

An angry Boyd said, "There was no intentional effort by anyone on our staff to delete or remove any information."

Lewis and Reade said their findings have been shared with the city, though Lewis said a formal report was pending.