Court orders Wolf administration to turn over more McGinty emails

The Wolf administration’s been ordered to release more of the emails Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Katie McGinty sent and received during her short tenure as The governor’s chief of staff.

The Commonwealth Court ruling caps a drawn-out battle between the administration and the state GOP.

 

A state Republican Party staffer first filed a right-to-know request seeking McGinty’s emails in July 2015, soon after she announced her Senate bid and left the governor’s office.

The administration resisted the request, calling it overly broad, but eventually released about 70 pages of emails.

State GOP spokeswoman Megan Sweeney says those emails ranged from innocuous to totally irrelevant. She says releasing more of them would be a public good.”Certainly if Gov. Wolf is as committed to transparency as he likes to say, then he would release these emails as soon as possible. And it wouldn’t have taken us over 15 months to do it,” she said.

The administration has 30 days to comply with the ruling. Sweeney acknowledges if the the administration takes the full 30 days the court allowed, the emails won’t have to be released until after the election has passed.”Right now they’re under a court order to release them. We hope they would release them as soon as possible. We respect the court’s decision, we hope that they would as well,” she added.

A spokesman says the office is currently reviewing the court’s decision.

A spokesman for the McGinty campaign says in a statement that “Katie is always on the side of transparency.”