http://foi.missouri.edu/bushinfopolicies/guberrecs.htmlWhat did he know then?? That was 2 yrs before he "decided: to run.. I'm thinking that he knew there was a bunch of stuff there that he did not want anyone nosing around in..
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At the behest of Mr. Bush, who was then governor, Texas enacted a law in 1997 that gave its governors the right to name an alternate depository for their official papers. But details of such a transfer remained murky under the law.
One of the bigger flash points concerned whether the George Bush Library, a federally run institution on the campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, had to comply with the state's open-records law, which requires answers to freedom-of-information requests within 10 days. Bush library officials said that they could not be expected to comply with a state law and lacked the resources to do so, though they have, in fact, come close to fulfilling within 10 days many requests for documents that have poured in to the library.
Mr. Cornyn, who ran for attorney general on a platform of open government, had conflicting pressures in issuing his decision. Upon taking office in 1999, he vowed to "vigorously enforce the laws requiring that government records and meetings shall be open to public view." He won an award two years later from the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas for living up to that promise.
Mr. Cornyn, a Republican, was a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team. He has also emerged as the Republican nominee for Senate and needs the continued support of his party in coming months.
Limiting President Bush's ability to dispose of his papers as he sees fit thus risks alienating the president, the governor and party loyalists.
Based on his reading of the Texas law and its legislative history, Mr. Cornyn wrote that the law gives the governor "the power to designate an alternate repository for his gubernatorial records, but according him no other authority to alter the manner in which such records are preserved or made available to the public."