Video: Attorney General Gary King Defends Release of Susana Emails

New Mexico's Attorney General Gary King on Friday defended his release of hundreds of campaign emails in response to a 2012 records request by the Santa Fe Reporter.

Speaking to Gwyneth Doland on New Mexico In Focus, King also said he was "not at all happy with the outcome" of his office's release of sensitive information contained in the governor's campaign emails. That sensitive information included online receipts sent to Gov. Susana Martinez' address for purchases of undergarments, books and songs on iTunes. One email also included the balance of a bank account of a Martinez staffer.

SFR published the emails in a December cover story after King's office furnished them in response to an Inspection of Public Records Act request. SFR redacted certain information, like the name and bank account balance of the Martinez staffer. The SFR story reported that, "Martinez campaigned on a platform of openness and transparency—and, as her speech shows, has continued to pay it lip service. Yet the emails demonstrate that, through the use of private email and other tactics, her administration has often done more to discourage transparency than uphold it."

King—a Democrat planning a 2014 run for governor against Martinez—stood behind his release of the emails, starting at 15:15 in the video below.

He explained that his office received them from "somebody who was a member of the public." Last year, Michael Corwin—then behind the liberal super PAC Independent Source PAC—provided the emails to King "pursuant to an allegation that the governor and people that worked for her were using their private emails to thwart the Inspection of Public Records Act actually," King said.

Corwin has said he received the leaked campaign emails from an anonymous source whom he's declined to identify. In response to the release of the emails last summer, Gov. Martinez requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigate whether they were "stolen." Martinez blasted King for releasing the emails amid an ongoing FBI investigation into their theft and has refused to comment on the contents of the emails. That's despite the fact that the governor's office released documents to the Albuquerque Journal publicly confirming the federal probe.

"Frankly they weren't secret documents by any circumstances because they were already in the hands of somebody who was a member of the public," King said. "And so we actually were faced with the point of if don't deliver those documents to—I think it was the Santa Fe Reporter that asked for them originally—if we don't deliver those documents then we subject ourselves to a lawsuit for not delivering documents that frankly by all the accounts that we can find are public records."

Doland, the former executive director of the Foundation of Open Government—which pushes for transparency in government—noted that government emails are only releasable if they have to do with official state business.

"The problem there for the governor is that if she hadn't been using her private email to hide the work that they were doing that was state work from the public by using their private emails," King replied, "she would have never exposed herself to that."

He added that "there's actually precedent" to releasing the emails with sensitive information: "Like If I use my private telephone to do state business then all of the records from all of my telephone records become public records," he said. "It's not just the ones were I did state business or whatever because I essentially have opened the door to that."

The Republican Party of New Mexico has accused King of wrongdoing for emails showing he forwarded messages on his government account to his campaign account, but a spokesman said King was merely trying to follow the law by keeping politics separate from state business.

King, as the attorney general, handles Inspection of Public Records Act disputes.

"Like I said I'm actually not—not at all happy with the outcome of that but I think it is the outcome that's dictated by the law," King said. "And we as the Attorney General's office try very hard to comply with the law in New Mexico."

SFR has emailed the governor's spokesman Enrique Knell requesting that he comment on King's remarks. We'll update this post if he gets back to us.

Santa Fe Reporter