Topic: Newsmax
A March 6 Newsmax article by Luis F. Perez rewrites a U.S. News & World Report item in which Mike Huckabee tries to dismiss a Mother Jones report on the inaccessibility of his records from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, in part because he had the hard drives of the computers used by him and his staff erased and physically destroyed before he left office.
Perez portrays the issue as one of Mother Jones "falsely referring to missing records and computer hard drives from his time as governor" -- going even farther on the whitewashing limb than U.S. News' Paul Bedard did -- but Huckabee never disputes the central facts of the Mother Jones article. Documents confirm that the hard drives were "crushed under the supervision of a designee of [Huckabee's] office," and the backup tapes of the information on the hard drives have not been seen since they were turned over to a former aide. Neither U.S. News nor Newsmax address the issue of the missing backups.
As the Arkansas Times notes, everything Huckabee did was perfectly legal under state law, which is unusually permissive in the amount of records a former governor can keep secret. U.S. News and Newsmax have apparently decided that merely following the law is good enough.
