A lawyer for Governor Easley, Andrew A. Vanore Jr., attempts to explain away troubling notes about deleting government e-mails by suggesting they might not actually mean what they appear to say.

Late last week, The News & Observer's Pat Stith received, by request, notes made by two public affairs officers in the Easley administration. Two of the officers, Julia Jarema of Crime Control and Public Safety and Diana Kees of Environment and Natural Resources, jotted down at a May 2007 meeting of administration spokesmen some troubling language. It involved an increase in public records requests, care to be taken with e-mails to and from the governor's office, and deleting e-mails daily. There's room for interpretation there, but precious little.

The administration pooh-poohed this issue early this month, shortly after its firing of Debbie Crane, spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Easley ordered Crane's pink slip following a series of articles in The N&O detailing a badly planned and executed reform of the state mental health system. On the day of her firing, Crane accused the administration of telling spokesmen to delete e-mails. Officials denied that there was such a policy.

Now, though, come the notes from Jarema and Kees. Vanore says they could be interpreted in a number of ways and that he didn't know which was right. Here's a common-sense view: The public wanted more information that the governor's office was reluctant to provide, so spokesmen were ordered to delete, daily. Vanore also ordered the two women not to explain their notes.

Easley has appointed a panel to look into his administration's e-mail handling policies. The notes from the two public information officers suggest just how far out of whack, compared with the requirements of the public records law, those policies had become. That's the case even though Vanore supplied copies of a number of e-mails that had been sent, showing that not all were deleted.

Public records are the public's property, preserving a record of government actions. Tossing e-mails into the cyber wastebasket makes it seem as if there was something to hide. Whether or not that's so, the twisting explanations of what occurred continue to reflect poorly on an administration that ought to have known better.