Pence turns over emails
Questions arise about how account with AOL was used
Attorneys for Vice President Pence delivered 13 boxes of state-related emails to the Indiana Statehouse on Thursday in an effort to make sure they are archived as required by law.
The move came on the same day The Indianapolis Star revealed that Pence used a personal AOL account to conduct public business as Indiana governor, raising questions about whether all of his emails regarding state matters were within public reach during his time in office.
Stephanie Wilson, a spokeswom- an for new Gov. Eric Holcomb, said officials have not fully reviewed the documents.
“It’s been expressed to us that a lot of what’s in those boxes, if not everything, we already have,” she said. “But we haven’t verified that.”
Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said the records contain emails to and from government accounts, as well as emails between Pence’s AOL email account and other private email accounts. He declined to characterize the emails beyond that.
Lotter said Friday night that Pence’s attorneys first attempted to deliver boxes of emails on Jan. 9, Pence’s last day in office. But Lotter said that amid Holcomb’s inauguration activities, there was a “lack of clarity (on) what to do with them,” so the attorneys brought the records back to the law firm’s offices.
When Pence learned this week that the emails hadn’t been delivered then, he directed the attorneys to take them to Holcomb’s office.
In his first public response Friday, Pence said he has “fully complied with Indiana’s laws.”
“We had outside counsel review all of my previous email records to identify any that ever mentioned or referenced state business,” he said at an event in
Janesville, Wis.
Indiana law requires all records dealing with state business to be retained and available for public information requests.
Emails exchanged on state accounts are captured on state servers, which can be searched in response to such requests. But any emails Pence sent from his AOL account to another private account likely would have been hidden from public record searches unless he took steps to make them available.
Lotter said any emails Pence sent to or from a state government account have always been available for public record searches. But he couldn’t say whether exchanges about state matters between Pence’s AOL account and other private accounts were made available for review in response to public record searches throughout his term.
Lotter said private-to-private communications involving public business would be a “small subset” of the emails under review.
Transparency advocates and ethics experts say Pence’s actions now suggest that emails from his personal account involving state business should have been made available throughout his four years as governor.
“We shouldn’t be accidentally discovering that officials from the governor down to school board members are conducting public business on private communication channels,” said Gerry Lanosga, an Indiana University professor and past president of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government. “That’s not the way it should work.”