Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) endorsed Mitt Romney over the weekend, a big pickup for the man who has spent years making the Granite State the keystone to his political comeback. In an ironic twist, Ayotte and Romney have more in common than just being Northeastern Republicans: they’ve been accused of scrubbing their potentially damaging internal emails before gearing up for a run for higher office.
Romney has been under fire for several days from Democrats over news first broken by the Boston Globe that Romney’s gubernatorial staff scrubbed emails from severs when he left office, leaving no electronic paper trail of his time as governor just as he spooled up his first run for the White House. Romney has said he did nothing out of the ordinary.
Ayotte could probably advise Romney on how to handle this story; she came under almost the exact same scrutiny during her run for Senate in 2010. The former Attorney General of New Hampshire, Ayotte came under fire from Democrats for appearing to allow many of her records to be deleted after she left the AG’s office to run for Senate. From Politico at the time:
Ayotte wrote an opinion on July 15, 2009, that said if an electronic record is deleted but remains in a back-up file, it would be considered “legally deleted” and “no longer subject to disclosure,” under the state’s right to know law. Five days later, she announced she filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission to run for U.S. Senate.
Democrats made a big deal out of this, and Ayotte was forced to call for her emails to be released. That may have helped her to victory, and it lays out a possible path for Romney to pursue as he tries to put his own problems with old emails to rest.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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