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Madison — A pool of at least tens of thousands of emails will likely soon become available from aides to Gov. Scott Walker when he was Milwaukee County executive.

One person's records consist of 25,000 to 40,000 emails, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele said in an interview Thursday. Prosecutors seized the computers of multiple people, but Abele said he did not know how many emails those others had exchanged.

Abele's comments marked the most detailed explanation yet of the scope of the records in question.

The documents come from computers that were seized in a 33-month secret John Doe investigation that resulted in convictions of six aides and associates of Walker. That probe was closed last year, but prosecutors used information from it to start a second investigation, which this month was halted by a federal judge.

In September, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked Reserve Judge Neal Nettesheim to order prosecutors to turn records over from the first John Doe probe to Milwaukee County so that the newspaper and general public could access them like other public records.

Nettesheim oversaw that probe and he agreed last week to send the records to the county, siding with the newspaper that the records should be available because they pertain to public business. Abele will be responsible for disseminating them to anyone who requests them, but he said he won't decide exactly how he will handle requests until Nettesheim enters a written order detailing what records will be turned over to the county.

"I want to share whatever I can responsibly share as quickly as I can," Abele said.

He said he was hoping for as much guidance as possible from the judge so he would know if he could turn over all the records immediately to the public or if he would have to review them the same way he does other records requests to make sure medically sensitive information and other private information is not released.

Abele said he was considering hiring outside lawyers to speed up the review of the records.

"I believe in public access and I believe in protecting privacy," he said. "There's so much gray area. I want to be efficient, I want to be responsible, I want to get it right."

Abele said he saw no reason to appeal Nettesheim's decision making the records public.

Already, the public has seen some 27,000 pages of emails from Walker and his aides as part of an appeal by Kelly Rindfleisch, Walker's deputy chief of staff at the county who was convicted of misconduct in office. Those emails revealed Walker aides sharing racist jokes and campaign staff weighing in on how to manage county government.

"It's a lot more than the Kelly Rindfleisch stuff," Abele said of the new batch of documents he expects prosecutors to hand off to him.

The material the prosecutors possess takes up about two terabytes, or 2,000 gigabytes, Abele said. The size is so large because prosecutors seized computers from witnesses and targets and made exact replicas of their hard drives.

The material includes everything on their hard drives, including emails, photos, music and computer programs. To give a sense of the size of two terabytes, Abele noted that two terabytes of documents make up about 150 million pages.