There is one thing she can’t do and she shouldn’t have said it, take all necessary steps to guarantee the preservation of evidence and full compliance with the law.”

She can’t guarantee “full compliance with the law” is records have been destroyed, to state that she can may show her bias in support of the Menino administration.

“Secretary Galvin’s office has been working on this matter to ensure, first and foremost, that all public records are preserved, and also to determine whether there have been any violations of the public records law by City officials,” Coakley said in a statement. “We are now involved in that review. We believe that Secretary Galvin has been successful in achieving preservation of the electronic files. My office will continue to work with Secretary Galvin going forward, and we remain prepared to conduct a full investigation and take all necessary steps to guarantee the preservation of evidence and full compliance with the law.”

In a press release from Coakley’s office, Galvin said, “I appreciate the assistance of the Attorney General’s Office in attempting to quickly resolve this matter.”

Instead, and I’m making some assumptions here, they hoped to hide this one away until the scandal died down, then “sanitize” it as needed, and return it via the appropriate channels. That way, in theory, the cover-up could’ve occurred and no one would know.

As a prosecutor once famously said in another case many years ago, you don’t have to prove someone is the sort of person who’d do such a thing if you can prove that he did it.

Hell, tons of people still say Clinton wasn’t a bad guy, too.

Perhaps to take this to an extreme, isn’t every serial killer remarked on by the neighbors as being a “nice, quiet man”?

So what if he’s “not a bad guy”, that has precisely zero relevance on what he’s capable of as a political operator. And by definition, a political operator’s greatest skill is to knife you in the back and get you to thank him for it.

Maybe he’s innocent, but I’m sure not going to let a personal anecdote determine that.

Kineavy got a new computer because his old one was running slowly. It was a problem he recognized and he complained about to the tech people. That means he requested the fix. That he did not remember any of this is clearly a problem with his story. Taking him at his word, he computer was farked up. He called tech, they did something, it worked again. How do you forget that?

If the public records related crimes to which he is subject and with which he may be charged include the element of intent, his lack of memory regarding the computer replacement would insulate him from the intent element.

Moreover, his story casts the computer replacement as a technical issue and not one as an affirmative action with intent to withhold and conceal documents from an investigation about city hall records and/or federal charges of government corruption.

That the attorney in City Hall did not know this history when the Federal subpeona was serve to produce documents in the Wilkerson case is also potentially a huge issue.