The governor of Texas will not show you his emails with Elon Musk because they are "intimate and embarrassing." That is not my phrase. It is the phrase Greg Abbott's office used, through its public information coordinator, Matthew Taylor, when The Texas Newsroom asked for the correspondence last year. The office added that the material was "not of legitimate concern to the public" and that releasing it "would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process." Then the office billed the reporters $244 for the time it would take to review the records, cashed the check, and for months produced nothing. When the pages finally came, 1,374 of them, all but about 200, were blacked out.
Take the governor at his word. What is intimate between a governor and the richest man on earth? Not love. Money. Musk gave $500,000 to Abbott's reelection this year. By the count in the lawsuit filed Monday, Musk has put about $366 million into Republican candidates and committees, "large amounts, directly and indirectly," to help Abbott. In return, by the same count, Texas has handed Musk's companies $1.66 billion in state tax breaks, a semiconductor grant to SpaceX, and, in July, $110 million up front to Starlink from the state broadband office, a payment odd enough to get the office audited. That is the intimacy. The embarrassment is the exchange rate.
The lawsuit comes from Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for governor, who asked for the records on September 29 as a state representative and got the answer the reporters got. She sued on Monday, two weeks before the election. Abbott's press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, called the suit "baseless," "an act of desperation," and "a political stunt," and said Hinojosa is "abusing her official capacity as an outgoing lawmaker to generate headlines." The governor, fresh from voting, called it a "lazy political stunt." Within two hours his campaign said it had already filed to have the case thrown out. Nobody in the governor's office said the emails were boring. Nobody said they were about the weather. They said, again, that you may not see them.
SpaceX weighed in too. Its lawyer, Kevin Bagnall, wrote to Attorney General Ken Paxton that the emails contain "commercial information whose disclosure would cause SpaceX substantial competitive harm." Read that slowly. A private company told the state's top law officer that the governor's mail is company property. Paxton agreed, mostly. That ruling is why the 200 pages are all anyone has seen and why the fight has moved to a courtroom in Travis County.
Here is the part that should bother Texans more than the money. The governor's office argues that frank discussion between a public official and a donor needs secrecy to work. That is backwards. Frank discussion between a donor and an official is exactly the discussion the public records law exists to expose. The law does not protect the frankness. It protects the public from it.
I believe the governor. The emails are probably intimate, and I am certain they are embarrassing. That is the reason to read them, not the reason to seal them. A man with nothing in his mail but policy does not charge the public $244 to look and then lock the drawer. He opens it.
Two weeks. Early voting opened in Texas on Monday, the same day the suit was filed, and it runs through November 3. The voters can ask for the drawer any day between now and then. After that the governor keeps the key for four more years, the emails get more intimate, and the rest of us get more embarrassed.
Joe Zeigler is the author of PrumpTutin: How Trump Sold the West and The Art of the Lie, from Arrakis Publishing.