Honestly, I believe it. Having worked in the big old dysfunctional machine (City of Portland), public records requests were the bane of our existence and difficult to get everything. Not because people were hiding things, but because the electronic records systems were so screwy. Add in the lack of document standards (people would have important memos, reports, data, etc willy nilly kept in personal folders, on their desktops, lack of standard naming conventions, you name it.). It's pretty much a disorganized mess.
However, in Adams' office? I wouldn't put something else going on as out of the question.
The story says you requested "email between Tom Potter and his chief of staff [Raglione]." Why does the title of this post refer to those as "Adams' missing emails"? Sounds like the city found Potter's missing emails.
For clarification: As someone that spends their entire day working on databases this is either the most boneheaded thing you can do (haven't experienced government IT shops though, maybe they are really that bad?) or a fairly clever excuse.
The first thing you would do after getting zero records is check the date/time parameters. Unless zero records was a good thing.
However, in Adams' office? I wouldn't put something else going on as out of the question.
I think it's his favorite thing to do.
The first thing you would do after getting zero records is check the date/time parameters. Unless zero records was a good thing.