Deleted City Hall email at heart of hearing said to hold Clancy campaign literature

LYNN – At the disciplinary hearing for Chief Financial Officer Richard Fortucci, it’s known as Issue No. 7.Of the 16 allegations Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy has leveled at Fortucci, this one asserts the CFO failed to oversee the city’s Information Technology Department, which is part of his job responsibilities.The allegation further contends Fortucci “demonstrated insubordination by failing to ensure the changing of passwords, despite being directed to do so by the mayor, and then falsely claiming these changes had been completed when, in fact, they had not.”According to the mayor and others, including city technology consultant Ken Weeks, the memories or hard drives in six computers used by former mayor Edward Clancy Jr.’s staff were wiped clean in the days before Kennedy took office.The act left the incoming mayor with virtually no public record of mayoral business, hampering operation of the municipal government and further stalling what many have described as a contentious transition.The mayor testified Tuesday that Fortucci told her the hard drives had been “inadvertently deleted.”Kennedy said she viewed Fortucci’s response as incredulous.Two days into her term as mayor, Kennedy ordered Fortucci to retrieve all administrative passwords. She assumed the order had been carried out, but on Jan. 11, an email was purposefully deleted from the City Hall computer server, according to testimony and city records. Only someone with administrative privileges could have accessed the server, a device located in the basement which links all municipal computers and stores information, she said.On Jan. 14, 2010, the mayor learned at least one City Hall employee still had an administrative password. She accused Fortucci of allowing a security breach and put Weeks in charge of information technology.Kennedy’s chief-of-staff, Claire Cavanagh, in a Jan. 14, 2010 email to Fortucci, stated, “We have been advised today that Jamie Marsh still has the administrative password to the city’s computer system files, which is a contradiction to what you reported to us last week.”Cavanagh was referring to James Marsh, the city’s director of community and economic development and former Clancy chief-of-staff.Guardian, a company hired by the mayor to recover as much erased data as possible, traced the email deleted on Jan. 11 to Clancy.It had been electronically mailed to the former mayor and contained an attachment – a document created Oct. 14, 2009, less than three weeks before the mayoral elections.According to Kennedy, the attachment was the draft of campaign literature in which Senate President Therese Murray endorsed Clancy for mayor.That literature was emailed to more than 20,000 registered Lynn voters shortly before the election, Kennedy told city councilors at Tuesday’s hearing.That the email and attachment were created and electronically transmitted at City Hall raised questions in Kennedy’s office about the appropriateness of Clancy staffers toiling on his reelection campaign during working hours and in a public building.Kennedy has alleged someone ordered or individually decided to destroy that email and its attachment, as well as to wipe clean the six hard drives. Fortucci under oath has denied any involvement in either incident.Three days after Guardian discovered the city’s computer server had been accessed, Kennedy learned Marsh still possessed an administrative password.Asked about the incident, Marsh said Wednesday, “I do recall receiving a call from Ken (Weeks) about a year ago, asking me about administrative rights. If I had them, it was news to me as I had left the position of chief of staff quite some time ago.”Marsh said nobody ever asked him to give up his password, adding he assumed he gave up administrative computer privileges upon leaving Clancy’s staff to take over as community development director.Appointed by Clancy to the community development post as part of a three-year contract, Marsh noted Wednesday that the present I