And the Plot Thickens...

Remember a while back we brought you this charming story? An aide to Boston Mayor Tom "Mumbles" Menino was found to have a whopping 18 e-mails covering a six-month span, even though state public records law requires e-mails be kept for two years. This aide also happens to be the conduit between the mayor's office and two, count 'em, two ongoing corruption investigations.

Well, there's a new twist:


E-mail inquiry yields 2d computer

Boston officials acknowledged yesterday that they have discovered a second computer used by chief mayoral aide Michael J. Kineavy, a hard drive tucked away in a sixth-floor office that may contain the bulk of the e-mail subpoenaed by federal authorities and formally requested by the Globe.

The computer, the officials said, was on Kineavy’s desk until it was replaced in April, after Kineavy complained it had been operating too slowly. The discovery directly contradicts prior assertions by the city that Kineavy’s computer had not been replaced in more than two years.

Oopsie. Imagine that, won't you? Not even a week after getting the FoIA request from the Globe, the old computer vanishes, a new computer takes its place, and the old computer gets stuffed in a hole and conveniently "forgotten". What a series of amazing and totally unrelated incidents! Now, the story mentions this sinister "double deleting" - which they explain as the act of deleting e-mails and then emptying the trash folder - which I am inclined to dismiss as more "journalistic integrity" (picture this said like "ewww, you just stepped in some journalistic integrity back there and it's stuck to your shoe").


This is nice:

Platt said the company has already started examining the older hard drive, but doesn’t expect results for a few days. He said the firm’s work on the first computer so far has cost roughly $25,000, and exhaustive searches of either drive could cost up to $250,000, because no automated tool can pick out individual e-mail messages from the vast amount of scrambled data that remain on the drives.

Got that? Even if this turns out to be nothing more than an employee deleting e-mails when he shouldn't be, the city - meaning the taxpayers - is on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars already and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. All because Kineavy didn't think the rules applied to him. Even in the best-case scenario - Kineavy was ignorant of the law and had nothing but the purest of motives (pointy-haired boss: "Deleting files makes the computer lighter!"), it's going to cost MA taxpayers a bundle to recover his mistake.

Of course, in the worst-case scenario, where an aide to the mayor attempts to destroy evidence to hinder an ongoing criminal investigation, the stakes rise considerably. With this new twist to the story, it makes the best-case scenario look less and less likely - what are the odds of a new computer showing up a scant few days after the FoIA request out of sheer coincidence? Obviously, the investigation has yet to play out in full, and there may very well be a perfectly innocent explanation to all this.

Then again, David slew Goliath (but that's not the way to bet...)

That is all.