Rick Scott Investigates Himself

It is always interesting when elected officials have to investigate themselves. Case in point are the Rick Scott transition team e-mails that were deleted. Many people were sceptical that this was an accident considering Team Scott's history of trying to go around Florida's Sunshine law. Blogger Peter Schorsch went nuclear and accused the Scott administration of being "Nixonian." With due respect to Peter, Scott isn't as Shakespearean as Nixon



Scott does share with Nixon the love of stonewalling and hiding information from the public.

It was an abrupt shift from Thursday, when Scott said during a St. Petersburg Times editorial board meeting that reporters had all of the e-mails in question.

In an interview with Associated Press editors Friday, Scott said "you give people as much information as you can" and promised that any public records request not handed over in 60 days should be done without any charge to news organizations.

The Sunshine require access to all public records. Not "as much information as you can."

The media first asked for these e-mails 8 months ago. Team Scott is only now confessing to the e-mails being lost. Chris Kise, who served on the transition team said that there were warnings the private firm handling the transition team's servers that the e-mails would be deleted once they stopped using the servers. The questions are why did the transition team ignore these warnings and why did it take 8 months to go public about losing the e-mails. This smells like a cover up.

Scott has called on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate why the e-mails were discarded. It is hard for me to believe that the FDLE can run a serious investigation on a governor that has the final say on the department's budget.