More Stenehjem emails to be released, attorney general says

An estimated 6,000 more emails from the late Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem have been recovered — this time from a personal laptop, Attorney General Drew Wrigley said Thursday.

The Attorney General’s Office released 2,700 pages of messages from Stenehjem’s state email to media on Wednesday after the records were found by the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation in February.

The former attorney general’s email account was permanently deleted by state employees immediately after his death in January 2022. But some of the messages still existed on his personal phone, which the BCI had copied and stored using investigative software.

Over 2,000 pages of Stenehjem emails released

The agency discovered the messages after executing a federal warrant to search the phone.

In light of what was found in the phone data, Wrigley figured it’d be worth checking Stenehjem’s personal computer for similar information, he said.

“It occurred to me that there could be evidentiary value in Wayne’s laptop that we don’t have,” Wrigley told the North Dakota Monitor.

Under Wrigley’s direction, law enforcement with the BCI in early March asked the Stenehjem family if they still had the device.

The Stenehjems handed it over voluntarily, Wrigley said.

According to Wrigley, the BCI found approximately 6,000 more state emails cached on the laptop.

But there’s more where that came from, Wrigley said. When searching Stenehjem’s cellphone data, investigators also discovered the former attorney general was using his personal email account for state business. 

“It’s been determined and relayed to me that there was a personal email account also on his phone, and that there appears to have been state business conducted on his personal email,” Wrigley said, adding that he did not yet know how many there are.

Wrigley added that it wasn’t improper for Stenehjem to use his personal email, but that they are still public records under state law if they relate to state business.

Wrigley said he hasn’t reviewed the records and is not sure what’s in them. It’s possible the 6,000 cached state emails could contain duplicates of the first approximately 2,000 messages, he said.

The North Dakota Monitor has requested copies of the additional emails and other information from the former official’s phone.

The attorney general didn’t have a timeline for when the additional emails would be released, but said his office is making the matter a “priority.”

Copies of deleted attorney general emails discovered

A review of the first roughly 2,000 emails by the North Dakota Monitor found most related to ordinary attorney general business. The emails were sent between November 2021 and late January 2022, when Stenehjem died.

Investigators were not able to access copies of all of Stenehjem’s state emails on the cellphone because the device appeared to only have a few months’ worth of messages downloaded, Wrigley said.

“It only went back to November of 2021,” he said. “And so it initially appeared that those were the only emails that we were going to have.”

While some of the content of the original batch of emails was redacted under public records exemptions, no messages were withheld, Wrigley said. The Attorney General’s Office did not charge the media for processing the emails released Wednesday.

Background

The emails garnered significant public attention after Stenehjem died in office. Immediately after his death, the former attorney general’s executive assistant, Liz Brocker, directed IT staff to wipe Stenehjem’s email account.

No charges to be filed for deletion of attorney general emails

News of the emails’ erasure first became public after members of the media requested records related to an over-budget building project pursued by Stenehjem’s administration.

In February, Wade Enget, the Mountrail County state’s attorney who was asked to assist on the case, announced he would not bring criminal charges for the deletion of the emails.

The state Information Technology Department, Microsoft and an outside expert determined the emails could not be recovered.

In wake of the attorney general’s death, the Stenehjem family asked the BCI for help unlocking his cellphone. Due to technological limitations, the agency was unable to access the device until summer 2023. At that point, the BCI returned the phone to the Stenehjems.

In February, BCI personnel realized the software used to unlock the phone had copied and stored Stenehjem’s phone data, the North Dakota Monitor reported previously.

State police then notified Wrigley of the discovery. The state obtained a federal warrant to search the phone as part of its investigation into former Sen. Ray Holmberg, who is indicted on child sex tourism charges.

Holmberg has pleaded not guilty to the charges. He is expected to go to trial in September.

Wrigley has said Stenehjem was a close associate of Holmberg and was interviewed as a witness in the case.