Secretary of State Mary Herrera
This time, Herrera’s office may have released too much information, news outlets report
Secretary of State Mary Herrera’s office is once again shifting gears and releasing public information it had originally refused to provide.
This time, the Secretary of State’s Office relented and released hundreds of pages of e-mails to media outlets without most of the redactions that were included when the documents were first released earlier this month.
Deputy Secretary of State Don Francisco Trujillo was quoted by The Santa Fe New Mexican as writing, in a cover letter accompanying the new, less-redacted records, that “Some of the privilege reductions in the first disclosure were inadvertently overbroad.”
The New Mexican and KOB-TV in Albuquerque did their own digging last week into the original, heavily redacted e-mail release and found that many of the redactions hid routine communications including a discussion about a bill being considered during the legislative session and a request from a county clerk for more Spanish-language voter registration forms.
Herrera ditched a previously scheduled interview with KOB on Monday, instead making Trujillo available for the interview. Trujillo told KOB that Herrera had “some other obligations,” then went on to provide KOB with the newly un-redacted e-mails.
“We were following our best understanding of the law,” Trujillo told KOB about the initial redactions in a report you can watch here, “and to avoid that appearance of not wanting to be transparent, the secretary of state – here’s your copy, here’s an explanation, which explains basically the fact that it was just a massive amount of work to produce in a short period of time.”
This is the second time the Secretary of State’s Office has relented after initially refusing to release information that is public under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. Trujillo initially denied media requests for a copy former Election Director A.J. Salazar’s resignation letter – a letter that was damaging to Herrera because it made a number of allegations of violations of state law and unethical behavior.
After the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government said the letter was a public record – and the Rio Grande Sun released an un-redacted version of it – the office shifted gears and released a redacted version.
Did Herrera release too much information?
But there’s a new controversy over information that’s un-redacted in the most recent e-mail release. The Internet version of KOB’s report states that “that too much information may have been released,” which may violate federal law regarding the release of medical records.
In some of the newly released e-mails, Salazar “specifically asks that his medical conditions relating to his time served in Iraq not be made public.” But in some of the released e-mails, “the secretary of state’s office released at least three unredacted emails having to do with his medical condition, and one that referenced a member of Salazar’s family and their medical condition,” according to KOB.
The New Mexican’s article makes reference to the same thing:
“While in the previous batch of documents released, the secretary of state went overboard in blacking out information, in the latest batch the office might have gone too far the other way. Among the messages released are those in which an SOS employee describes a personal medical condition and the medical condition of a family member.”