AP: Eckersley offered to keep quiet in exchange for job

The saga of a former aide to Gov. Matt Blunt took another today when Scott Eckersley said he would have not taken his story to the press if the governor’s aides found him another job.

That’s the news coming from a news break from Associated Press reporter David Lieb:

Scott Eckersley was fired in late September for what Blunt’s administration is now describing as poor job performance and misuse of state resources. But neither Blunt’s office nor Eckersley had said anything publicly about his firing until this past weekend.

That’s when Eckersley went public with allegations that he was fired after advising Blunt officials – orally, in a written memo and in e-mails – that the governor’s office wasn’t complying with its own policy about retaining e-mails as public records.

At the same time, Blunt’s administration released a stack of documents to the media intending to show Eckersley had done private work on state time and had received e-mails from a sexually oriented Internet site.

Eckersley said he had remained silent for a month after his firing because a private attorney working on his behalf had attempted to negotiate a deal with Blunt’s administration. Under the proposed arrangement, Eckersley said he would have remained silent and not pursued a lawsuit if he would have received a letter of recommendation and a job, preferably with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

“I just wanted a positive reference from the governor, and hopefully a place to go,” Eckersley told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Eckersley told the Tribune today that he told administration officials that an e-mail retention policy was going against state law. Richard AuBuchon denied that claim in an prior AP report.

This comes after Springfield News-Leader columnist Tony Messenger wrote a midweek column detailing how he received reams of documents about Eckersley case even though the same information was denied to Attorney Steve Garner. Garner is Eckersley’s lawyer.