Rosenthal's memory deleted, too

On March 14, Gov. Rick Perry appointed Kenneth Magidson, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Texas, as Harris County district attorney. Magidson, an assistant DA in Harris County from 1977 until 1983, when he became a federal prosecutor, will serve as DA until the end of December.  A newly elected DA will take office in January. Magidson most recently was the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force regional coordinator for the Southwest Region, and is also past chief of the Task Force Narcotics Division. Magidson takes a job that opened when Chuck Rosenthal, the DA since 2001, resigned on Feb. 15. Rosenthal resigned after the Texas Office of the Attorney General informed his lawyer that it would file a suit to remove him from office. The AG’s office had been investigating Rosenthal’s actions in connection with a series of e-mails that became public in January; those e-mails on Rosenthal’s work computer included several romantic notes to his executive assistant and some sexual and racial content. Meanwhile, also on March 14, in sworn testimony in a federal suit, Rosenthal wrote that he cannot rely on his memory in connection with how he managed the e-mails on his work computer. Rosenthal provided the supplemental declaration for U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt, as evidence for a motion seeking a contempt finding and sanctions against Rosenthal for deleting thousands of e-mails from his computer that were under subpoena. Rosenthal testified on Feb. 1, at a hearing in Hoyt’s court, that he deleted thousands of his e-mails in November 2007 in an effort to “simplify my desktop.” But in the declaration filed on March 14 in Eric Ibarra, et al. v. Harris County, Texas, et al. Rosenthal wrote that parts of a sworn statement he signed on Dec. 18, 2007, about the e-mails he deleted is incorrect. “While I believed the Declaration to be correct when I signed it, I now understand that I am unable to rely on my memory regarding the steps I took to manage the contents of my desktop and need to rely on reconstructing events from available documents and records,” Rosenthal wrote. “I have now consulted a medical specialist and am informed by him about conditions that have affected my perception and recollections over the past months.” Rosenthal wrote that while he testified on Feb. 1 that he had deleted e-mails older than July 24, 2007, from his deleted folder, “I now believe that this portion of my Declaration is incorrect.” In his resignation letter, Rosenthal wrote that the e-mail brouhaha and the media attention it attracted was a reason he decided to resign from office. He also wrote that prescription drugs had impaired his judgment.

-- Brenda Sapino Jeffreys