That left Gov. Mike Beebe, who
replaced Huckabee on Jan. 9, with no emergency funds for the last half of
fiscal 2007.

Documents that the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, describe the destruction
of the computer drives, as ordered by Huckabee’s office, and Huckabee
complaining strongly about his cell phone and Blackberry not working.

A memo dated Jan. 9 from a state
Department of Information Systems official to Huckabee told of the “disposition
of data maintained” by the department “for the office of the governor” during
Huckabee’s tenure.

“All drives have been subsequently
crushed under the supervision of a designee of your office,” wrote Gary
Underwood, the agency’s chief technology officer and a former Huckabee staff
member.

Beebe has asked the Legislature to
replenish the $ 500, 000 emergency fund, but a legislative committee has so far
rejected his request.

On Jan. 3, the Department of
Information Systems requested $ 25, 000 from the governor’s office “for the
closeout of information systems for the office of the governor.”

Huckabee on Jan. 5 sent the
department the last $ 13, 000 in the emergency fund, leaving an outstanding
balance of $ 12, 000. The $ 13, 000 would be used to help pay for crushing the
hard drives.

Department of Information Systems
Director Claire Bailey said hard drives for 83 computers and four servers were
destroyed, or “crushed,” after information was downloaded onto backup tapes.
Underwood supervised it and delivered the backup tapes to Huckabee Chief of
Staff Brenda Turner, who had ordered the hard drives crushed, Bailey said.

She said the computers were located
in the state Capitol; the state’s Washington, D. C., office; the state police
airport hangar; the Governor’s Mansion; and the Arkansas State Police drug
office.

In 2003, Huckabee announced that
after he left office, his official gubernatorial papers would be stored at his
alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University, a private institution in Arkadelphia.
He said at the time that the college would decide which documents would be
released to the public.

A Nov. 20, 2006, e-mail from
Huckabee’s director of media operations, Kerry Rodnick, to Turner asked, “Is
there someone at OBU that could tell me how they’d like to receive our digital
files ?”

With the emergency fund empty just
before he took office, Beebe asked the Joint Budget Committee to put another $
500, 000 in it. On Thursday, the committee rejected Beebe’s request.

An alternate resolution for $ 250,
000 to meet Beebe’s request halfway also failed.

Lawmakers said they wanted to know
why Huckabee had spent it all and where it went.

Beebe said he’s not sure what to
make of the committee’s rejection of his request.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Beebe
said. “I hope that it’s not an inside political issue at the expense of taking
care of emergencies and taking care of our people. The emergency fund is there
for a reason. We just had seven counties declared disaster areas. We may have
more. We’re coming into tornado season. That fund they usually try to keep, if
at all possible, at $ 500, 000 at all times so that money is there for counties
and cities and people if there is a disaster. I don’t know what they’re doing,
but I’m going to have a visit with a few legislators and I’ll find out.”

Beebe said he didn’t know whether it
was normal for the governor’s office computer hard drives to be destroyed.

“It certainly removes any
opportunity to have any information,” he said.

Beebe has just finished a four-year
term as attorney general. He said he knows of no hard drives being destroyed
there in advance of his successor, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, taking
office.

“Certainly [there were ] no orders
for that by me,” Beebe said.

He said he did tell his attorney
general staff to delete e-mails and other files from office computers in
preparation for the new staff in McDaniel’s office.

Asked whether “crushing” hard drives
should be considered a criminal offense of destroying state property, Beebe
said he didn’t know.

Bailey said the Department of
Information Systems arranged to handle computers during the transition in
administration in the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices, but not the
attorney general’s or treasurer’s offices, which are the other constitutional
offices that changed hands in January as a result of the November election.

She said the Department of
Information Systems didn’t crush hard drives in the lieutenant governor’s
office.

“Some of our customers do crush and
/ or overwrite their hard drives themselves, and some of our customers ask for
our assistance,” she said. “We, as an agency, always overwrite or physically
crush our internal hard drives depending on the sensitivity of the data.”

A Huckabee spokesman didn’t return a
message Thursday, and Huckabee didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking his response
to questions about the computers and his use of the emergency fund.

Beebe said he wasn’t aware until
recently that Huckabee had used the last of the emergency fund to pay costs
associated with the governor’s office file purge.

Beebe spokesman Matt De-Cample said
Beebe’s office now has 22 “updated” computers with new hard drives, 27 new
desk-top computers, and 22 new laptops. He said the computers and other
equipment were purchased with money from the governor’s office operational
fund.

“We are operational,” he said. “We
are not lacking in computers right now. We couldn’t run the office without
computers, and we couldn’t make the request [to the Legislature for the
computers ] until we were in office.”

He said that forced Beebe to dip
into the operational fund for $ 335, 000 to buy the computers.

Bailey said the computers would
likely have been replaced even if the hard drives weren’t crushed. She said that
her department had replaced the computers at the governor’s office the day
before Beebe took office and Beebe had to reimburse the department.

HUCKABEE EXPENSES According to the
Bureau of Legislative Research, Huckabee spent the $ 500, 000 on 22 things, the
most being $ 100, 000 for a group called Play It Again Arkansas “to purchase
[musical ] instruments and provide operational funding.” Huckabee has been
supportive of that group, which distributes used musical instruments to
children. Among other things, he gave $ 10, 000 to the Hot Springs Documentary
Film Institute to buy a car; $ 97, 000 to the Game and Fish Commission’s
“Hooked on Fishing, Not Drugs” program; $ 10, 000 to the city of Little Rock to
help in “the development of the Mexican Consulate” office; $ 15, 000 for the
Arkansas chapter of the American Red Cross to help “prepare young people to
deal with disaster situations.” Huckabee’s wife, Janet, works for the Red
Cross.

Sen. Percy Malone, D-Arkadelphia,
made the request at the Joint Budget Committee for a list of everything
Huckabee has used the emergency fund for.

“I want to make sure it’s not a fund
the governor has to use however they want,” Malone said. “If that’s what we’re
going to do, we don’t need to call it an emergency fund.”

Kim Arnall, assistant director of
the Bureau of Legislative Research, said the fund has traditionally been used
by governors for “emergency type situations or maybe not emergency type
situations.”

Arnall said the governor has another
fund at his disposal, the Governor’s Disaster Fund, which amounts to $ 9. 5
million each year for things such aid during natural catastrophes.

Beebe’s request to replace the $
500, 000 failed with 22 votes in favor, seven votes short of the 29 needed to
pass. The alternate motion for $ 250, 000 failed with 25 votes.

Sen. Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, said
he voted against the $ 250, 000 in hopes that his colleagues later would
approve the $ 500, 000.

Rep. Bruce Maloch, D-Magnolia,
offered the motion to give Beebe half of what he requested. He said later that
it was not legislators’ attempt to send a “message” to Beebe as some at the
Capitol thought.

He said he and other legislators
thought that the emergency fund being depleted “really isn’t our problem.” But
he said he also thought that it “isn’t Gov. Beebe’s fault either.” He said he
wanted to “be fair” to Beebe, but he and other legislators want more
information about the fund. He said Beebe may end up getting the entire $ 500,
000.

Richard Weiss, director of the state
Department of Finance and Administration, said the emergency fund is typically
replenished during changes of administrations.

Rep. Rick Saunders, D-Hot Springs,
wondered in the committee whether Beebe wanted more emergency money to buy
lighting for news conferences in the governor’s conference room. He noted that
he had read in the Democrat-Gazette that Huckabee’s staff removed lighting
which wasn’t state property.

A Dec. 28 e-mail from Rodnick,
Huckabee’s director of media operations, to Huckabee chief of staff Turner
detailed some last-minute sorting out of state property and private property.

“Gary Underwood and I met this
morning and went through all equipment and communications related material to
determine what belongs to the state and what did not,” Rodnick wrote. “We were
able to define what was his, mine and the Republican Party’s.”

Rodnick noted that the
conference-room podium was bought with party funds but “retrofitted with state
money.” He wrote that one option would be deconstructing the podium to give the
proper parts to the state and the party.

“The concern comes when the new
administration comes in and notices the podium gone and the guts on the floor,”
he wrote. “I feel it would be better to avoid potentially negative press by
leaving the podium asis.”

Clint Reed, executive director of
the state GOP, said he had no knowledge of the party buying items for the
governor’s office.

As for the Department of Information
Systems billing, Beebe said, “What I do know is apparently DIS never charged
the governor’s office what they were supposed to over the last several years
for the governor’s office proportional share of [information technology ]
services.”

He noted that the state continues to
have “big problems” with the way the Department of Information Systems has
billed state agencies for computer services.

Last fall, Huckabee recommended that
the state set aside $ 37 million of the expected $ 843 million state surplus to
pay the federal government in case the state loses a lawsuit related to
Department of Information Systems’ billing.

The federal government has
maintained that federal dollars sent to the state wrongly went toward computer
billing at the Department of Information Systems.

Beebe said the governor’s office
owes a “bunch” of money to the Department of Information Systems for services
provided in the past few years, but he wasn’t sure of the exact amount. He said
Bailey would know.

Bailey said the governor’s office
owes $ 33, 302 for services rendered during the Huckabee administration. She
blamed “internal DIS billing process failures” for bills not previously being
sent to the governor’s office. BLACKBERRY AND CELL PHONE

Huckabee also was dealing with other
technological issues in the weeks before he left office.

“WHO THE HECK TURNED OFF MY
BLACKBERRY ?????” Huckabee wrote in a Dec. 23 e-mail.

The Dec. 23 e-mail from Huckabee to
Bailey concerned a disruption in the governor’s communication services during
the transition to Beebe’s administration.

“My Blackberry has been disconnected
by some genius who must have thought I quit being governor Dec. 23,” Huckabee
wrote. “1. Who did this and why ? I’d like an answer now. 2. Get it turned back
on. NOW ! I’ve called Cingular to try to get this fixed. We need to make sure
our computer lines aren’t down. This is beyond excusable.”

Huckabee was one of the first people
at the Capitol to have a Blackberry, a portable email and cell phone device the
he has had since at least 2002.

Bailey quickly responded to
Huckabee’s concern, writing that “I will take care of this now.”

Huckabee then wrote Bailey, saying
that his cell phone wasn’t working either. “I want to know why this happened
and who was responsible. It wasn’t very smart.”

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