Welcome to Bizarro Amerika!

Gov. Rick Scott's magically deleted email debacle is starting to sound a bit ridiculous already, even though he's ordered an "investigation" from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

As you may recall, St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald Capitol reporter Michael C. Bender went looking for some emails from the governor and his transition team while he was Florida's governor-elect, and was told on August 18 that the emails he'd requested months ago were deleted in April.

Now, not only do we have another outrageous public-records fiasco from the governor's office, the St. Petersburg Times also suggests there may have been a "coverup" of what really happened to those emails.

That "investigation" Scott ordered the FDLE to perform came just one day after the St. Petersburg Times says the governor told them they had received all the emails.

The man who was Scott's attorney during his transition period as governor-elect says members of Scott's staff simply didn't understand that the emails would be deleted when they closed their account with the private hosting company, Rackspace.

Rackspace has an agreement customers must sign or accept to when they purchase the company's services. Among those conditions are statements that make it very clear that if you don't ask for emails to be archived, they'll be deleted, and even recommends archiving services for customers with "regulatory requirements":

...

Well, is ignoring those terms the fault of Scott's staff, or the fault of Harris Media, the company the Times says was hired to handle online communication for the governor's transition team that actually held the contract with Rackspace?

As Peter Schorsch of Saint Petersblog pointed out, Harris Media's vice president of business development and marketing is Allison Guimard -- the woman who sometimes goes by the name "Allison Scott," because, of course, she's Rick Scott's oldest daughter.

When the Herald discovered this a few weeks ago, they called Guimard to see if she had any comment on the situation. Scott's office called back instead, and told them her daughter's business was a private matter, and that "she does not solicit or take business from any state government clients."

Now that investigation will be handled by the FDLE, which isn't an ideal situation, according to the runner-up in the 2010 gubernatorial election, Alex Sink.

It's not exactly an independent investigation, Sink says, because Gerald M. Bailey -- the commissioner of the FDLE -- is employed at the will of Scott and his Cabinet.

Of course, Scott has a stake in how this all ends up -- the penalty for "knowingly violating" the state's public records law is subject to penalties as extreme as impeachment and jail time, while other violations that aren't done "knowingly" carry the maximum penalty of a $500 fine.

Still, the governor has requested the FDLE to look into the matter, asking that they "investigate thoroughly the issue of how the Rackspace email accounts came to be closed, and whether any of the email data in those accounts can be recovered."

I wish Jeb was back..

yeah.. imagine that.

Gov. Rick Scott said he learned within the past two weeks that transition e-mail accounts could not be recovered from a private computer server, potentially erasing records that state law requires to be kept.

But documents show that Rackspace, the Texas-based company that provided e-mail, notified the transition team as early as March 14 that no records existed from 44 of 47 accounts that had been closed, including Scott's.

"I sincerely apologize for any inconveniences this causes you and your company and would like to refer you to Rackspace Archiving in the event a future incident should present itself where you need to access email correspondence sent/received by a user who had deleted emails or the mailbox has been removed," Rackspace customer service technician Leonard Vega Merino wrote at the time.

Merino's e-mail was to Luke Baker, a staffer with Harris Media, the online communications company that set up the Rackspace accounts. Baker had told the company: "If we do not recover them, then it is a potential violation of Florida state law."

Chris Kise, a Tallahassee attorney who advised Scott's transition, was given Merino e-mail on March 30. Kise then contacted Rackspace but received this reply on April 8 from company attorney Steve Priolo: "Our technicians verified that there is no data left on the hosted environment for the other mail boxes as they were disabled longer than 14 days ago."

I'm very afraid for this state under this guy. Especially the schools. altho, I only have one left in school and she's in 10th so hopefully she won't be too affected.. but I fear for a lot of other kids who are going to get fucked by this nut-ball..