Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is refusing to release months’ worth of emails sent to Elon Musk and his companies under public records laws, according to a joint report from ProPublica, The Texas Newsroom, and The Texas Tribune. After initially agreeing to an information request, the governor’s office argued that the emails are covered by a law that prevents the disclosure of “highly intimate or embarrassing” information.
The Texas Newsroom, which is investigating Musk’s influence over the Texas government, asked the governor’s office in April to share emails with the billionaire dating back to last fall. Though the governor’s office accepted a fee of $244 to gather the records, The Texas Newsroom reports that it later refused to follow through on the request.
In a letter to the Texas attorney general shared by The Texas Newsroom, one of Abbott’s public information coordinators said the emails consist “of information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public,” such as “financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and a governmental body.”
As noted by The Texas Newsroom, this language is “fairly boilerplate,” drawn from a common-law privacy exemption to public disclosure requests on Attorney General Ken Paxton’s website. SpaceX, which is based in Texas, similarly objected to the disclosure of its emails, claiming they contain information that would cause the company “substantial competitive harm.”
Earlier this year, for instance, The Texas Newsroom published emails and calendar information revealing that a Texas lawmaker had planned several meetings with representatives from SpaceX. It also showed that Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wrote a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration to help convince the agency to let SpaceX increase the number of its rocket launches.
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