BATON ROUGE, La. — Top officials in Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration used personal email accounts to craft a media strategy for imposing hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid cuts — a method of communication that can make it more difficult to track under public records laws despite Jindal's pledge to bring more transparency to state government.
Emails reviewed by The Associated Press reveal that non-state government email addresses were used dozens of times by state officials to communicate last summer about a public relations offensive for making $523 million in health care cuts. Those documents weren't provided to AP in response to a public records request.
Jindal, now in his second term, has become a leading voice among Republican governors and is considered a potential presidential candidate. His administration's emails fold into a national debate over the use of personal email accounts by government officials to discuss official business.
The issue was a prominent one during the administration of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Palin's use of private email accounts as governor prompted a lawsuit in which the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that officials using private email accounts for public business need to keep documents "appropriate for preservation" under the state's records management act. In response, her successor has instructed employees to use state email for conducting state business.
The head of a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks public records issues said government officials often use private email accounts to try to sidestep disclosure laws designed to provide sunshine in government.
"Absolutely people use private accounts to hide things," said Kenneth Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, based at the University of Missouri. "If government business is conducted or information about it is sent or received on personal computers or through personal email accounts, that does not keep it from being the public's business."
The email exchanges in Louisiana took place this past summer, as the Jindal administration was planning steep reductions to programs for the poor and uninsured because of a drop in federal Medicaid funding.
Participants included Jindal's top budget adviser Kristy Nichols, health care secretary Bruce Greenstein, Greenstein's chief of staff and health policy adviser, and Jindal's communications staff. Jindal was not included in the emails, and it's unclear whether he knew his top staff used private accounts to conduct public business.
The dozens of conversations held outside the state's official email system covered subjects such as press releases, responses to news coverage of the budget cuts, preparation of an opinion column to be submitted by Greenstein to newspapers and complaints about reporters' coverage. The emails were sent mainly through accounts administered by Google and Yahoo.
In one exchange, Calder Lynch, a health policy adviser to Greenstein, directs a communications staffer to send certain types of items to Lynch's personal Gmail account, rather than to use his state government email address.
The emails were provided to AP by an administration official who participated in the discussions and who asked not to be identified because he wasn't authorized to release them.
Jindal campaigned for his first term on a platform of providing more transparency in government.
However, the emails in question weren't among more than 3,800 documents and emails provided to AP by the Department of Health and Hospitals in response to a request for information on discussions surrounding the health care cuts.
Louisiana's public records law states that all documents used in "the conduct, transaction or performance" of public business are considered public except in cases where there is a specific exemption.
Administration officials didn't respond directly to questions about whether they were using private email accounts to shield conversations about public business from disclosure.
© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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