BISMARCK, N.D. (KFGO) – A company hired by the North Dakota State Information Technology department was unable to recover the thousands of deleted emails of former Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and former Chief Deputy Attorney General Troy Seibel.
In a four-page report, Planet Technologies said it attempted four methods to retrieve the emails, but all were unsuccessful.
Planet Technologies said it tried to retrieve the emails by checking the soft-deleted mailbox, relicensing the mailbox, checking archived emails, and checking for a litigation hold.
The soft-deleted and relicensing attempts were unsuccessful due to Microsoft’s 30-day policy after deletion of emails and/or accounts. There were no archived emails in the system and no litigation holds.
“When the State of North Dakota received the initial request for recovery of the mailbox data, too much time had already passed to do such an action,” the report said. “Planet is confident in saying with 100% confidence that there is no data to be recovered for any mailbox within the Microsoft Office 365 system.”
The emails were deleted after a request from Liz Brocker, an administrative assistant in the office, after the sudden death of Stenehjem. Brocker resigned in July. An open records request showed that Brocker asked for the account to be deleted in an email to an information technology employee on Jan. 29, a day after Stenehjem died from cardiac arrest.
She wrote that the deletion was approved by Deputy Attorney General Troy Seibel.
State law says a public official cannot knowingly delete public records “without lawful authority.”
“State Information Technology experts had previously informed this office that the emails in question were irretrievable,” Attorney Drew Wrigley said. “While we had no reason to question their conclusion, we did ask that they hire outside consultants to make one final assessment. Planet Technologies, Inc. has now completed their evaluation, concluding that the State Information Technology Department was correct – the deleted email accounts no longer exist and cannot be resurrected.”