Mother Jones: "There's a Mike Huckabee mystery that won't go away. Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid."
There's a Mike Huckabee mystery that won't go away.
Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.
In 2007, during Huckabee's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, the issue of the eradicated hard drives surfaced briefly, but it was never fully examined, and key questions remain. Why had Huckabee gone to such great lengths to wipe out his own records? What ever happened to a backup collection that was provided to a Huckabee aide?
Huckabee is now considering another presidential run, and if he does enter the race, he would do so as a frontrunner. Which would make the case of the missing records all the more significant. These records would shed light on Huckabee's governorship—and could provide insight into how a President Huckabee might run the country. Meanwhile, observers of Arkansas' political scene—including one of Huckabee's former GOP allies—say the episode is characteristic of a politician who was distrustful and secretive by nature.
In February, Mother Jones wrote to the office of Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe seeking access to a variety of records concerning his predecessor's tenure, including Huckabee's travel records, calendars, call logs, and emails. Beebe's chief legal counsel, Tim Gauger, replied in a letter that "former Governor Huckabee did not leave behind any hard-copies of the types of documents you seek. Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been 'cleaned' and physically destroyed."
He added, "In short, our office does not possess, does not have access to, and is not the custodian of any of the records you seek."
"Huckabee just absolutely doesn’t trust anybody," says one former high-ranking Arkansas Republican. "In my experience, if you don't trust people, it's because you're not trustworthy."
The person who may know the most about Huckabee's records—or lack of them—is Jim Parsons. A self-described gadfly, Parsons is a former Green Beret turned good-government crusader who has filed dozens of Freedom of Information requests targeting Arkansas politicos on both sides of the aisle, including the Clintons. Shortly after Huckabee left office, Parsons went to battle with the state over his records.
In January 2007, Parsons requested "a copy of all information" on the Huckabee administration's computers the day he left office. Beebe's office provided Parsons with a January 9 memo addressed to Huckabee from the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, reporting that all of the gubernatorial hard drives had been "crushed under the supervision of a designee of [Huckabee's] office." That is, a Huckabee aide had made sure all this information was destroyed.
The memo included another tantalizing piece of information: The information stored on the drives had been saved on a backup, which was handed over to Huckabee's then-chief of staff, Brenda Turner. The history of the Huckabee administration, then, was locked away, under the watchful eye of a former aide. What did she do with this information? Where is it now? Turner, who now runs the PR shop for a Arkansas-based purveyor of Christian-themed greeting cards, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. (Contacted via his political action committee, Huckabee didn't respond to questions about his records.)
Parsons requested the backups and eventually filed a lawsuit against Huckabee and Beebe, alleging that the new governor had siphoned taxpayer money from an emergency fund to pay to replace the destroyed hard drives. Altogether, the new equipment cost over $335,000. Huckabee countered that the information on the hard drives included private details, such as social security numbers, that shouldn’t be released to the public. In the end, Parsons' suit was dismissed—largely because he didn't name Turner, who apparently possessed the records, as a plaintiff.
What do the Huckabee files hold? The records could provide details on any number of unsettled controversies involving a governor that faced at least 15 ethics complaints concerning, among other things: his failure to report gifts and outside income, his alleged use of state funds and resources for political and personal purposes, and the pardon of a convicted murderer and rapist who went on to kill again once released.
A former high-ranking Arkansas Republican who was once close to Huckabee and who requested anonymity told Mother Jones that the destruction of the hard drives puzzled him. "I don’t know what that was about, if they had things to hide or not," he says. But, he adds, the episode fits with Huckabee's general reticence when it comes to public disclosure. "Huckabee just absolutely doesn’t trust anybody. In my experience, if you don't trust people, it's because you're not trustworthy. We see the world through our own eyes."
Huckabee's aversion to public disclosure extends beyond his gubernatorial papers. He and his handlers have also taken steps to block access to videotapes of his sermons, spanning his 12 years as a Southern Baptist minister before he entered politics. During the 2008 campaign, Mother Jonesreported that Huckabee's campaign had refused to make the sermons public—and that, according to an official at one of the churches he'd led, much of the archival material relating to Huckabee's tenure had been destroyed.
Despite the opacity surrounding Huckabee's political and pastoral record, he has at times fashioned himself as a staunch advocate of government transparency. Running for president in 2007, Huckabee put forth a bold open-government proposal. "There's an old rule that says that when the sun shines, the germs disappear," he said in one video clip (watch it below). "Well you know, frankly, there are a lot of germs in government." So he proposed disclosing every federal government expenditure online within 24 hours. "You could find out exactly where every dollar of the federal budget goes, down to what it cost to mow the courthouse lawn in your hometown at a federal courthouse," he said. Discussing this plan at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (better known as CPAC) in February 2008, he said, "We should demand transparency and accountability from our government."
Yet Huckabee's calls for transparency did not extend to his own records. "There were twelve years of information there, of dealings of the executive branch," marvels Jim Parsons, referring to the hard drives. "And that bit of history is just lost. I thought it was wrong, physically and financially and historically and educationally wrong to just destroy them." He adds, "I probably would vote for him. It's just that he did a bad thing there."
Some of Huckabee's gubernatorial papers do still exist, records that were selected by his office and handed over to his alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University. Due to funding hang-ups and other delays, a spokeswoman for the university says the records won't be accessible to the public for another two years. That is, after the conclusion of the 2012 presidential contest.
Siddhartha Mahanta is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones.
Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee joins Senator John McCain and Senator Teddy Kennedy as a leading contestant for the 2005 Quisling of the Year Award. McCain and Kennedy were the clear front-runners with the amnesty bill for twelve million illegals and strong defense of Mexico’s southern border. But lightening struck and Governor Mike came out of nowhere to make it a three-way race in a stunning speech to the LULAC convention in Little Rock (League of United Latin American Citizens).
The Quisling Award is giving annually to the American who surrenders the most of America to a foreign government. The award is named after Vidkun Quisling, who when the Germans invaded in Norway promptly got on the radio and surrendered the whole country. After the war, the Norwegians tried him, found him guilty and executed him for treason.
The Arkansas News Bureau records his treason as follows: "In a impassioned speech before hundreds of influential Hispanic civil rights leaders from across the nation, Gov. Mike Huckabee told a captive audience Wednesday that America is great because it has always opened it doors up to people seeking a better way of life."
Huckabee then made the most stunning admission of complete capitulation to the Illegals that have replaced American workers throughout Arkansas, "Pretty soon, Southern white guys like me may be in the minority,’ Huckabee said jokingly as the crowd roared in laughter."
It would seem that a lot of Southern white guys in Arkansas who lost their jobs to illegals are not going to be laughing, at all. If Gov. Huckabee appears at any NASCAR race, there is a good chance he might be accidentally hit by a flying lug wrench. Huckabee then goes on to be an open borders advocate, "I would hope that no matter who we are, or where we are from, that America should always be a place that opens its arms, opens it heart, opens its spirit to people who come because they want the best for their families," Huckabee said, as the largely Hispanic audience gave him a standing ovation.
The most notorious employer of illegals in the country funds Gov. Huckabee. The News Bureau further reports, "Huckabee was the keynote speaker, along with Tyson Foods Inc. Chairman and CEO John Tyson, at a noon luncheon of the League of United Latin American Citizens, which is holding its 76th annual convention in Little Rock."
Before Huckabee spoke, John Tyson thanked the Hispanic community for standing by the Springdale-based food giant during the federal government's investigation of the company a few years ago. The U.S. Justice Department investigation alleged that Tyson helped to smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S. and employed them at various chicken-processing plants across the Southeast. After a seven-week trial, Tyson and several managers of poultry processing plants were acquitted in March 2003 of those charges. "At the time, it was a very difficult and very tough time for our company," Tyson said. "Thank you LULAC for standing by us."
"I am proud to tell you that more than 40,000 of our workers are Latinos," Tyson said of the company's 114,000 employees. "We are learning, growing and benefiting from that diversity." These are 40,000 jobs that had employed Americans from Arkansas. They were replaced by illegals.
Tyson foods became the poster boy for a new economic term, "occupational displacement." This is when the hiring of immigrants becomes so great that it destroys the occupation (meatpacker) for the native residents. Generations of men who had supported themselves and their families with the tough, low skilled jobs of the plant were displaced by lower wage illegals. (Note: the same thing happened in the 1890’s. Factories and coalmines in Pennsylvania employed native Scots-German and Irish workers. These workers would be replaced when the company brought in non-English speaking Europeans, at lower wages. Deja vu, all over again.)
Sooner or later John Tyson is going to jail and the sooner the better. His company has been relentless in replacing Americans with low wage illegals. When the Immigration Control movement gains control of the White House and the legislative bodies of Congress, one of the first orders of business should be to throw this S.O.B. in jail. Further, this company should be hammered with RICO suits. The entire Tyson Foods operation is a sleaze ball conspiracy to import illegals and put them to work in Tyson’s meat packing plants.
Tyson Foods escaped prosecution and palmed the hiring of illegals on to a few "rogue" plant managers, rather than a deliberate corporate policy. Tyson had put up posters in Mexico telling the illegals streaming north that there were jobs at Tyson. They also hired corrupt laborer brokers who recruited in Mexico. But the corporation was smart, left no paper trail and the witnesses against it were lower level managers who had pleaded guilty.
It is clear that Gov. Huckabee has sold out to the corporations desiring more illegal immigration. No doubt, he received large contributions for his political campaign from Tyson Foods. If one recalls, Hillary Clinton invested a thousand dollars with James Blair, then an attorney working as outside counsel to Tyson Foods. Hillary picked up a cool hundred thousand dollars in a year’s time.
The Republican governor has backed in-state tuition bills for illegals and been against bills that would require verification of citizenship to vote and report illegals in the country. "Huckabee is ready to sell out Americans and the good citizens of Arkansas at every turn." He said, "Arkansas needs to make the transition from a traditional Southern state to one that recognizes and cherishes diversity "in culture, in language and in population." In other words, surrender to the illegals. Most amazingly, the Arkansas news bureau reports that "many believe will run for president in 2008." This must be some sort of delusional fever running through Gov. Huckabee’s mind. Apparently, he does not read the political polls or talk to anyone but his Tyson Foods benefactors. Every political poll shows that Americans overwhelming approve of deporting illegals and putting troops on the border. However, these quisling politicians believe they can be elected to high federal office after creating a national immigration disaster by selling out to illegals and the companies that hire them.
This quisling, Gov. Mike Huckabee, will be lucky if he gets elected to dogcatcher in Arkansas, much less President of the United States.