Well this doesn't look good. The Boston Globe reports:
Just before Mitt Romney left the Massachusetts governor’s office and first ran for president, 11 of his top aides purchased their state-issued computer hard drives, and the Romney administration’s e-mails were all wiped from a server, according to interviews and records obtained by the Globe."No electronic record of any Romney administration e-mails" is a huge amount of records missing.
Romney administration officials had the remaining computers in the governor’s office replaced just before Governor Deval Patrick’s staff showed up to take power in January 2007, according to Mark Reilly, Patrick’s chief legal counsel.
As a result, Patrick’s office, which has been bombarded with inquiries for records from the Romney era, has no electronic record of any Romney administration e-mails, Reilly said.
The laptops and hard drives were state property that were sold to private individuals who worked for Romney. As a result, the data and records contained on them are now completely gone from public record. The Romney response seems to be that selling used equipment to outgoing staff is normal practice, but that dodges the real question of why email correspondence was destroyed. There should be publicly available histories of how elected officials do their work, who they talk to, and how they make decisions. Whatever the law relating to equipment sales, the real question is about the destruction of these pieces of communication.