Documents missing from Steelman's treasurer office

Sarah Steelman's political opponents aren't finding much daylight in their Sunshine requests for records while she was Missouri's state treasurer.

In fact, it appears that most of the key documents from her four-year term between 2004 and 2008 aren't available.

The current state treasurer's office tells POLITICO it hasn't been able to track down schedules, emails and other documents from Steelman's tenure that are routinely retained.

"We have received Sunshine Requests similar to this question. What we have found is that we do not know how they kept those records because we do not have them. Our team has searched the office for any schedules and public documents and we do not have them," said Jon Galloway, the treasurer's office director of communications and policy.

Steelman, now a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, has often touted the virtues of transparency and open government. In a 2004 editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she wrote that "every elected official at every level of government should strive to ensure that our laws, our records and our meetings are open to the public's scrutiny."

During her time in office, her staff even pointed to "special information technology" that was used to preserve emails for years.

Galloway said the current office has emails that were received by Steelman to her state account, "but there are no sents." He also said there were no "executive boxes" turned over to the Secretary of State's office at the end of her term for preservation.

According to state law, documents that were created or received in the office of an elected official, including calendar books, logs, diaries, recordings of meetings and trips are to be transferred to the state archive.

Democrats and other Steelman foes -- now on the hunt for strands of opposition research to use against her in a marquee race -- are likely to seize on the missing documents to call into her question her commitment to transparency.

The issue could also be used to neutralize the damage caused to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who was forced to admit she had failed to pay taxes on a personal plane she used for official travel. (She's since paid more than $300,000 in back taxes and fees.)

A Steelman spokesman did not respond directly to questions about the former treasurer's document retention policy and instead turned fire on McCaskill.

"Senator McCaskill's liberal allies are so desperate to change the storyl ine from Sen. McCaskill's failure to pay over $300,000 in taxes over four years, they are frantically engaging in gotcha politics to find anything which distracts from the central issue: that Sen. McCaskill has clearly proven she cannot be trusted to safeguard tax dollars," said Steelman spokesman Jennifer Morris.