Senat said state law makes no provision for the sort of legal review described by Mullins, and that an eight-month wait for easily accessible records such as a personnel file is not acceptable under state law.

“Access delayed is access denied,” he said. “Lost in this is that these records belong to the public, and in this case to the employee (Gregory).”

In court documents, Gregory’s attorneys accuse the governor’s office of delaying release of the records as a tactic to combat Gregory’s wrongful termination suit. On Oct. 29, 2013, Mullins told Mareshie, “The governor’s office is not the custodian of employee personnel files. Those files are maintained by the Office of Management and Enterprise Services and would have to be requested from that agency.”

This was two months after Mullins’ staff had collected the relevant documents into an electronic file. When Gregory did request her personnel file from OMES, she was given three pages, none of them relevant to her dismissal.

Mullins, in the deposition, denied he delayed the records, saying the eight-month wait was caused by a backlog of open records request documents to be reviewed by him and one of his assistants.