This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 4, 2009 - St. Louis lawyer Chet Pleban, who had been the lawyer for the state investigative team charged with probing former Gov. Matt Blunt's e-mail preservation practices, has little good to say about the team's report.
"It was a waste of time, energy and money,'' Pleban said Wednesday, the day after the report was filed in Cole County Circuit Court, as the last piece of a court settlement that ends the team's lawsuit against Blunt.
Pleban emphasized that he didn't blame the two investigators who prepared the report -- former Highway Patrol chief Mel Fisher and former patrolman Rick Wilhoit. Rather, he's unhappy with the two court-appointed lawyers, Louis Leonatti and Joe Maxwell, who settled the suit in December.
Pleban maintains that there should have been no settlement and that the case should have gone to trial. He points to the report's findings -- which concluded that Blunt's office had failed to use proper practices to preserve e-mails and make them available to the public and the press under open-records laws.
However, the report said there was no evidence that Blunt or his staff did anything intentionally wrong.
Pleban continues to be irked that the Cole County Court barred the team from interviewing Blunt. "The report is, at best, incomplete,'' he said.
And he snickers at the report's finding that Blunt got bad advice about e-mails from then-chief counsel Henry Herschel. The upshot, said Pleban sarcastically: " 'It's not Blunt's fault. It's the lawyer's.' "
Pleban believes that the investigators were set up, so that their work ended up being a whitewash.
His differences with Leonatti and Maxwell came to a head in late January, when the investigative team missed their initial deadline for filing the report because of legal concerns initially raised by Leonatti. At that time, Pleban also was told that he no longer represented the investigators, a role he'd held since he and the investigators were appointed by then-Attorney General Jay Nixon in November 2007.
The team and Pleban were charged with probing allegations that Blunt and his staff were intentionally destroying office e-mails so that they wouldn't have to comply with open-records requests from various news outlets.
The report says that there was "insufficient evidence ... to either prove or disprove the allegation that there was any endeavor by an individual or a group of individuals to destroy or erase sought-after Blunt office e-mails that existed for a time on backup tapes in the state Office of Administration."
Pleban still doesn't buy that. But he admits he's no longer in any position to do anything about it.
