The chairman of the state's Democratic Party demanded that the Republican candidate for attorney general shed light on her stint as a state attorney and turn over a handful of emails that were withheld from the public by state officials Tuesday morning.
Leslie Rutledge, who faces Democrat Rep. Nate Steel, abruptly left her job in late 2007 after 14 months as a child welfare attorney for the Department of Human Service to join Gov. Mike Huckabee's 2008 presidential campaign.
After her resignation, DHS officials placed Rutledge on the "do not rehire" list due to what they classified as "gross misconduct," but DHS officials have not said why Rutledge was barred from ever returning to the agency.
Last week DHS staff released more than a 1,000 of Rutledge's emails but withheld 17 non-duplicate emails and sought an opinion from current Attorney General Dustin McDaniel to determine if the remaining emails were releasable pursuant to the state's Freedom of Information law.
Chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, Tony Insalaco, clamored for Rutledge to OK the release of the remaining emails in a Tuesday news release, stating that voters are entitled to know the work history of a candidate seeking to be the state's top law enforcement official.
"Arkansans deserve to know why [Rutledge] has a personnel record at [DHS] that says 'gross misconduct'," Insalaco wrote. "[Rutledge] should not have to be forced to release emails that voters deserve to know. Honesty and transparency should not be this hard to come by."
The decision to withhold the remaining emails came from former Supreme Court Justice Annabelle Tuck, who handled the opinion after McDaniel recused himself from the issue. She found that a portion of the remaining emails were "work performance evaluations" exempt from public disclosure.
Rutledge -- who went on to work for the Republican National Committee before setting up a private practice in Little Rock -- said Tuesday that she won't sign off on the release of the last emails.
She noted that supervisors originally had listed her termination as "voluntary" but altered the paperwork days later.
"I have no confidence in those files and what is contained in those records," Rutledge said. "The real concern [should be] how and why a state agency would change an employee's personnel file 10 days after they resigned voluntarily."
When asked if she knew the content of the emails, Rutledge said she did not, and that she was focused on her campaign and not her old job.
The emails in question were requested by several media organizations including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette after it was reported that Rutledge was no longer welcome to work at DHS.
Rutledge began working at DHS in October 2006 after more than a year at a Jacksonville law firm. She'd previously worked for 10 months as a deputy legal counsel to then-Gov. Huckabee.
The opportunity to join Huckabee's presidential campaign staff didn't give her enough time to put in a two-week notice, she said.
Ten days after her Dec. 3 resignation, the "voluntary" termination section was scratched off from her paperwork and DHS officials banned her from future employment due to "gross misconduct."
Rutledge said she was never notified of her "do not rehire" status until asked about it by reporters earlier this month and said she didn't know why her records were altered and even theorized the revisions to her work history could be politically motivated.
Of the 17 unique emails subjected to evaluation by the attorney general's office, nine were released on Tuesday while six were ruled performance records that were not releasable since they were not a part of a suspension or termination.
Another two were withheld because Tuck said she couldn't determine if they were releasable.
"The [two unclassified] emails reflected on theses pages clearly detail the employee's job performance, at the behest of a supervisor," Tuck wrote. "But it is not clear from their face whether they were created for evaluation purposes."
The nine unique emails that were released Tuesday depicted two instances of problematic episodes in Rutledge's time at DHS.
In a series of late July emails, Rutledge was sternly reminded how to correct a procedure error she had made that forfeited a financial subsidy to some of her clients.
In another series of emails from late October 2007, an Arkansas Children's Hospital official wrote that Rutledge failed to communicate with a hospital employee and that the incident was "the most recent example of difficulties encountered by my staff summoned to court [by DHS attorneys]."
Rutledge declined to comment on the old, juvenile-related cases.
Rutledge's opponent, Steel, did not return calls for comment on his opponent's work history, though he has argued she lacked the right kind of work experience to step into the job.
Metro on 09/24/2014