Policy Fugue by Kenneth Corbin (bio )

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What happened to Ray Nagin's e-mail?

By Kenneth Corbin on July 7, 2009 4:40 PM

The Times-Picayune, the newspaper of record in New Orleans, has called for a criminal investigation into Mayor Ray Nagin and his staff. A criminal investigation into a New Orleans politician? Yes, yes, there's a first time for everything, right?

But this isn't about nepotism or payola (although Nagin might be on the hook for that one, too). No, no, nothing so conventional. This is about e-mail.

In February, a large swath of Nagin's e-mail went missing. Nagin called the disappearance "inadvertent," claiming that a storage problem caused them to be deleted from the city's overloaded mail servers.

From the Times-Picayune's editorial:

"Even now, he clings to that explanation.

"But as New Orleanians learn details about the e-mail's disappearance, Mayor Nagin is sounding as plausible as if he were claiming that the dog ate his e-mail."

Nagin's office brought in members of the Louisiana Technology Council to figure out what happened. Their investigation concluded that the e-mails were deliberately deleted by an individual with administrator privileges. What's more, they said that all the messages dating from 2002 through this February, when Nagin's e-mail account was moved to different servers.

More suspicious still? Of the 59 accounts stored on the city's servers, only Nagin's messages went missing.

These things happen. A disgruntled insider absconds with an external hard drive, say. Or the White House witlessly misplaces millions of e-mails.

But Nagin, who is described on his official bio page as a man whose "progressive policies resolved to erase the image of New Orleans as place where graft is part of the old world charm," has attacked the integrity of the investigation, dismissing the individuals involved (who were commissioned by his own office) as lacking the technical expertise to make an authoritative determination as to what happened to his e-mail.

So as the bayou buzzes with headlines like, "Is Ray Nagin our Richard Nixon," we are again reminded of the old political saw about the cover-up being more damaging than the crime, and probably some lesson about information security, too.

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