RALEIGH -- Reuben Young, once the chief legal adviser for former Gov. Mike Easley, must sit down with lawyers representing several media outlets and be interviewed under oath about whether e-mail messages about public business were ordered to be destroyed while Easley was in office.
Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning issued an order Thursday giving lawyers for The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer, other news organizations and the John Locke Foundation permission to interview Young, now the state secretary of crime control and public safety, under oath.
The scope of the questioning is to be limited to issues in the lawsuit, filed in 2008.
The media outlets sued Easley and four top aides for access to e-mail to and from Easley's office after a fired spokeswoman said that staffers were told to routinely delete e-mail to and from the governor's office.
By law, e-mail about public business is public record.
The state has sought to dismiss the lawsuit, but a judge first wanted to hear the depositions of four members of Easley's communications staff.
The depositions showed that the administration wanted to avoid having embarrassing information surface through e-mail messages. They also showed that Easley used a private e-mail account to conduct state business.
The now-defunct address, which used the name "Nick Danger" spelled backward, was secret to all but a select group of senior advisers and associates.
Nick Danger was the fictional, hard-boiled private eye featured in Firesign Theatre performances who often got into crazy, secret adventures involving mistaken identity, betrayal and femmes fatales.
The backward bit may have come from a joke in the show or it may have been a reflection of the fact that Easley wrote backward.
In one of the depositions, a former communications officer said Young, Easley's general counsel, had encouraged employees to use the phone, rather than sende-mail, to discuss sensitive matters.
While the communications directors said they primarily communicated with Easley by telephone, messages regularly went to and from that "RegnadKcin" address.
