Dar­ren Ba­haw

A Unit­ed States fed­er­al judge has or­dered Google to hand over the se­cret e-mail records be­long­ing to At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan and Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar so that the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion can un­rav­el claims of a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy.

The rul­ing from Judge William Or­rick came three days af­ter the com­mis­sion filed a law­suit in the US Dis­trict Court in the North­ern Dis­trict of Cal­i­for­nia.

A copy of the judge's rul­ing was post­ed yes­ter­day on the Cour­t­house News Web site.

The judge has grant­ed a two-week win­dow from Au­gust 14 to al­low Google to chal­lenge his rul­ing.

Ram­lo­gan dis­closed for the first time last week that he too had filed a law­suit against Google in June 2013 seek­ing to pre­serve his records to help clear his name in the E-mail­gate scan­dal.

The ap­pli­ca­tion sought to ob­tain records from the fol­low­ing e-mail ad­dress­es–anand@gmail.com; anand@tstt.net.tt and kam­lapb1@gmail.com.

Ac­cord­ing to the judge's rul­ing, the PM has not con­firmed that any of the e-mail ad­dress­es be­long to her and Ram­lo­gan de­nies that he has a gmail ac­count, but has con­sent­ed to search of his e-mail ac­count at anand@tstt.net.tt which is con­trolled by Google.

Ac­cord­ing to the court doc­u­ment, Su­ruj Ram­bachan, now the Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter, and Gary Grif­fith, now the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty min­is­ter, have con­firmed that the Hot­mail ac­counts - su­ru­jram­bachan@hot­mail.com and cap­tain­gary­grif­fith@hot­mail.com - be­long to them and have au­tho­rised Mi­crosoft to re­lease their records to the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion.

In re­la­tion to a re­quest re­lat­ing to an ac­count bear­ing the ad­dress anan@gmail.com, Google has con­firmed that it does not ex­ist.

Among the fac­tors the judge con­sid­ered, ac­cord­ing to his rul­ing, were

(i) whether 'the per­son from whom dis­cov­ery is sought is a par­tic­i­pant in a the for­eign pro­ceed­ing'

(ii) 'the na­ture of the for­eign tri­bunal, the char­ac­ter of the pro­ceed­ings un­der­way abroad and the re­cep­tiv­i­ty of the for­eign gov­ern­ment or the court or agency abroad to US fed­er­al court ju­di­cial as­sis­tance'

(iii) whether the re­quest 'con­ceals an at­tempt to cir­cum­vent for­eign proof gath­er­ing re­strict­ing or oth­er poli­cies of a for­eign coun­try or the Unit­ed States' and

(iv) whether the re­quest is 'un­du­ly in­tru­sive or bur­den­some.'

The judge con­clud­ed that the dis­cre­tionary fac­tors weighed in favour of the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion.

He said the in­for­ma­tion be­ing sought con­cerned three e-mail ac­counts and an af­fi­davit to au­then­ti­cate cer­tain e-mails and one of the ac­count hold­ers has al­ready giv­en con­sent to ac­cess his ac­counts.

His­to­ry of com­plaint

The in­ves­ti­ga­tion was launched af­ter Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley read an e-mail thread dat­ing back to Sep­tem­ber 2012, pur­port­ing to be a dis­cus­sion be­tween AG Anand Ram­lo­gan, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, Min­is­ter Su­ruj Ram­bachan and then na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty ad­vis­er Gary Grif­fith.

The con­tents of the e-mail, which bore sim­i­lar ad­dress­es of the named politi­cians, dis­closed a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy to re­move the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions Roger Gas­pard from of­fice by get­ting the Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie to ap­point him as a judge of the High Court, harm in­ves­tiga­tive re­porter Denyse Renne, and the pay­ment of an undis­closed sum of mon­ey to an un­named per­son.

The e-mails were ex­changed in the midst of the Sec­tion 34 scan­dal, which in ef­fect cre­at­ed a law would have ben­e­fit­ted Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress fi­nanciers Ish­war Gal­barans­ingh and Steve Fer­gu­son, who were charged with a se­ries of crim­i­nal of­fences re­lat­ing to the $1.6 bil­lion Pi­ar­co Air­port De­vel­op­ment Project.

Renne's ar­ti­cle in the T&T Guardian prompt­ed pub­lic out­cry and the law was even­tu­al­ly re­pealed dur­ing an emer­gency ses­sion of Par­lia­ment.

A par­al­lel in­ves­ti­ga­tion was al­so launched by the po­lice and the Guardian has been re­li­ably in­formed that a re­quest to the Cen­tral Au­thor­i­ty, a de­part­ment un­der the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al's Of­fice, was made last month to ap­proach the Unit­ed States Jus­tice de­part­ment for as­sis­tance in ob­tain­ing the e-mail records.

In that in­ves­ti­ga­tion, Gas­pard has been in­ter­viewed and the po­lice have ob­tained an un­signed state­ment from Archie.?