A former top aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo testified that he was “aghast” to learn that emails had disappeared from his government account — even though they were tied to a pending lawsuit over the infamous “Wandering Dago” food truck.
Revelation of the admission by Bennett Liebman, former deputy secretary of racing and gaming, came amid controversy over the Cuomo administration’s recently revealed policy of automatically purging all state workers’ emails after 90 days.
The owners of the “Wandering Dago” food truck sued the state after getting barred from the grounds of the Saratoga Race Course over the truck’s potentially ethnically offensive name.
The emails were also the subject of a records request made under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.
During a Feb. 6 deposition, Liebman said he “assumed incorrectly that the governor’s office would preserve documents that had been the subject of a FOIL request, but apparently that was not the case.”
“I was sort of aghast that these documents were not available,” he added.
It’s unclear when Liebman’s emails were deleted. He was reported to have retired from his $150,000-a-year state job in August.
Last month, government watchdogs blasted Cuomo following the revelation that his administration was deleting all official emails older than 90 days, despite an ongoing corruption investigation by Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara.
The policy was quietly adopted in June 2013, but it wasn’t uniformly followed until late February, when the state’s chief information officer, Maggie Miller, sent out a memo ordering that it be enforced.
“A 90-day email retention policy flies in the face of [Cuomo’s] promise to have the most transparent and accountable state government in history,” Dick Dadey, head of the Citizens Union, said at the time.
“It can result in hiding a lot of state-government activity that should be known to the public.”
Other states, including Washington, Florida and Connecticut, keep their official emails archived for between two and five years, while North Carolina maintains them for 10 years.
Critics also maintain that New York’s email system has enough capacity to store about three decades worth of messages for every worker.
The establishment of New York’s email retention policy also came about a month before Cuomo announced the formation of his anti-corruption Moreland Commission.
Cuomo unexpectedly disbanded the commission in March 2014, but its records were subpoenaed by Bharara’s office, which used some of the information to bust then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver in an alleged $4 million bribery and kickback scheme.
Following Silver’s stunning arrest, Bharara warned that other lawmakers remained in his cross hairs, ominously telling the public to “stay tuned.”
In the “Wandering Dago” case, owners Andrea Loguidice and Brendan Snooks maintain that the state violated their contract to sell food at the track, costing them about $330,000 in revenue.
They reportedly settled with the New York Racing Association for $68,500, but still have pending claims against the Office of General Services and various officials.
In court papers filed following Liebman’s deposition, they asked for sanctions against the individual defendants for allegedly destroying evidence in their case.
In response, the state on Wednesday said none of the officials was involved in the “inadvertent loss of Liebman’s email through the automatic deletion policy.”
Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the governor, said: “The Executive Chamber was not a party to the lawsuit, so there was no litigation hold on this account. The emails fell under the same policy that has been in place in the chamber since 2007.”