DV Journal

(This article first appeared in Broad + Liberty)

Internal records obtained from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office suggest the email account of a top aide who accused a cabinet secretary of sexual harassment was deleted under suspicious and possibly selective circumstances — and not as part of any routine records policy.

The aide, who resigned in 2023 after lodging the allegation, appears to be the only official whose email records have been entirely wiped from state servers during that period.

The absence of any preserved messages raises sharp questions about whether the Shapiro administration took steps to erase a digital trail tied to a politically sensitive personnel matter — and whether broader email retention practices in the Governor’s Office are compromised or selectively enforced.

The accuser was a young woman in her early thirties who, in the earliest days of the Shapiro administration, accepted a job as a deputy in the Governor’s Office of Legislative Affairs headed up by Mike Vereb, who had held the same position for Shapiro in the Attorney General’s Office. Vereb, a Republican, had a long history with Shapiro, given that both served as state representatives from Montgomery County in the General Assembly slightly more than a decade ago.

Feeling immense pressure, the young woman abruptly quit just weeks into her job, and later filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. Although she left her job in March 2023 and the complaint was filed just weeks later, Vereb managed to stay in his position until September of that year, even weeks after the Governor’s Office settled the matter out of court for $295,000.

The Governor’s Office has never answered why Vereb managed to keep his position for so long except to tell The New York Times — at a moment when Shapiro was under consideration to be Kamala Harris’s vice presidential candidate — that he did not know of the allegations against Vereb until many months later.

Seeking to understand how Vereb stayed in his position, and also to try and understand the thoroughness of any investigation into the matter, Broad + Liberty filed two extensive Right to Know Law requests, the first in November 2023, and a second in March 2024.

The March request asked for all emails for the former deputy for essentially her last week in the job, “March 2, 2023, to and including March 8, 2023.” When those and other emails were not produced, Broad + Liberty elevated the matter to court, essentially arguing that it was impossible for there to be no email traffic in the deputy’s email account for that time.

In a February hearing in Commonwealth Court, an attorney for the governor said, “What the affirmation [denying the records] says is that the Office of [the] Governor no longer possesses the records of this employee who was – who left commonwealth employment I think about a year to a year and a half before this Right to Know Law request came in,” attorney Thomas Howell said, making an incorrect calculation of the lapsed time.

“That, frankly, should not be surprising that an account of a departed employee would be disposed of in accordance with the records retention schedules. Those retention schedules are public, and they establish that, you know, your general emails are deleted as soon as they’re no longer necessary.”

Based on that remarkable courtroom disclosure, this outlet published a story on the revelation that the accuser’s email account had been completely deleted, then filed multiple follow-up Right to Know requests to test Howell’s assertion.

The results of those requests are now in and have only created more questions. In addition, a new response from the governor’s spokesperson now indicates that the Governor’s Office was already in settlement negotiations by the time Shapiro supposedly learned of the accusations against Vereb — and it still leaves about a three-week gap from when the governor supposedly learned of the matter and when Vereb resigned.

When did the governor know?

In August 2024, Bonder told The New York Times that Shapiro “‘was not aware of the complaint or investigation until months after the complaint was filed.’”

Bonder gave no additional relevant facts towards that end for this article, except for the notable disclosure that, according to Bonder, settlement negotiations were already underway before Shapiro even knew what was going on.

“In this instance, as stated in the [accuser’s] complaint, the employee immediately resigned her position upon making a report and an independent investigation immediately began, as is our administration’s policy,” Bonder said. “The governor was not aware of the complaint or investigation until months after the complaint was filed, and at that time the Commonwealth had already begun settlement discussions with the complainant.

“As the governor and our administration has stated, it is clear that this process should have allowed for this complaint to come to his attention sooner. Having learned from that experience, processes are now in place so that if any complaint is lodged against a member of the governor’s senior staff or cabinet, he will be informed immediately. Gov. Shapiro has no tolerance for harassment in the workplace, or anywhere else,” Bonder concluded.

Broad + Liberty asked who specifically in the chain of command erred by keeping the information from the governor. Bonder did not answer that question.

Documents previously obtained show the out-of-court settlement was signed over a one-week period stretching from the last days of August to the first few days of September. Negotiations certainly would have had to have begun days before the document was first signed in late August. Vereb did not resign until Sept. 27.

Was the deletion of emails just routine housekeeping?

Howell clearly implied that the deletion of any emails for the accuser couldn’t be viewed as malicious in any way, but rather just a part of normal day-to-day operations. But RTK requests that tested that theory tell a different story.

For example, an executive deputy in the legislative affairs department, Adrienne Muller, left her position in November 2023, between one and two months after Vereb’s resignation, according to her LinkedIn resume.

In March, Broad + Liberty requested emails for Muller for the same week as was originally requested for the accuser: March 2, 2023, to and including March 8, 2023. Under Howell’s premise, Muller’s email account would also have been deleted, but those emails were provided April 23, 2025.

In effect, the Governor’s Office claimed it was normal to delete an account within a year of an employee’s departure. But Broad + Liberty was able to obtain emails for Muller — a departed employee — roughly 488 days after she severed her employment with the Governor’s Office.

This outlet also recently obtained email metadata for Vereb but not for the accuser, even though both left their posts in 2023.

“At the time that Mr. Vereb separated from Commonwealth Employment, the Office had already received multiple requests under the Right to Know Law (RTKL) that sought or implicated his email records,” the governor’s spokesman, Manuel Bonder said in an email.

“In accordance with agency procedures, those records were retained to ensure that those pending RTKL requests would be appropriately addressed. Litigation and additional requests implicating those same records continue; therefore, the Office still possesses Mr. Vereb’s relevant email records. No such requests required the continued retention of [the accuser’s] emails and as of the date of your March 8 request for those emails – which came in more than one year after she left employment – they had been addressed in accordance with Commonwealth policies and practices,” Bonder said.

Bonder said there were no RTK requests for the accuser’s email until Broad + Liberty’s request of March 2024, while saying there were “multiple” RTK’s for Muller’s emails, which is why her account was kept. Searching a previously obtained RTK log, Broad + Liberty was able to locate one RTK for some of Muller’s emails about the time she left office, and a couple of others that came in over the next few months of 2024.

Despite the Governor’s Office insisting that the accuser’s emails were handled in accordance with policy, the retention schedule in force at the time requires retention of emails from the Office of Legislative Affairs — where she worked — for a minimum of two years or until the end of the legislative session, whichever is longer. Her emails were sought just one year after she left.

Nowhere in Bonder’s response did he point to any portion of the retention schedule that would support his claims. Bonder also did not respond to a follow-up question asking when the accuser’s email account was deleted.

Adding even more complexity to the matter is the obvious fact that the accuser launched legal action against the Governor’s Office, which theoretically should have resulted in litigation holds. Broad + Liberty has a pending RTK on that matter.

Conflicting and missing metadata

Email metadata provided in response to RTK requests further underscore the question of why some email data continues to exist for departed employees while the data for the accuser’s email is missing.

In the last month, Broad + Liberty obtained metadata for the first half of March for Vereb, even though he left 18 months ago. But the Governor’s Office said it had no metadata at all for the accuser’s account — even from the same period.

Additionally, as part of the appeals process of the first extensive RTK filed with the Governor’s Office in 2023, the office produced a privilege log. A privilege log is supposed to give a court (or, in this case, the OOR) a thumbnail sketch of the documents being withheld without giving away the core content of the document.

In the log obtained in 2024, the Governor’s Office identified at least two emails to Vereb sent on March 8, 2023, that do not appear anywhere on the metadata log.

“As described in the Office’s response, the Office withheld or redacted records or portions of records that are exempt from access under the RTKL. Where email ‘metadata’ is exempt, it has similarly been redacted or withheld from access,” Bonder said. “The entries that you reference are exempt from access under the RTKL.”

It’s unclear why the office removed those entries entirely instead of merely redacting all relevant fields, which it did in some instances of the responsive document.

Did the governor’s office abide by retention schedules?

After Broad + Liberty published the original story about the deletion of the accuser’s emails, reporter Ford Turner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked Shapiro about the story at a press conference.

“Last I checked you wrote for the Post-Gazette, so it’s strange you’d be citing some other news source, but I didn’t read the story and I’m confident my administration follows all document retention policies,” Shapiro said.

Little evidence supports the governor’s claim.

At the most granular level, an office or department should ideally have what’s called an “Agency File Plan” which is a playbook that shows the office how to deal with and execute its document retention requirements.

A video from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which has responsibility for setting retention schedules, says an agency file plan defines “what each record’s retention is, its location, the person responsible for them, and what to do with them when retention ends… This is a useful guide for office staff when they need to locate records… and to help staff know when records should be gotten rid of when retention ends.”

Broad + Liberty requested a copy of all Agency File Plans in use at any time since 2020. The Governor’s Office said it had no responsive documents.

Although maintaining an Agency File Plan is considered best practice and not legally required, the governor’s open-records attorney referred us to a retention schedule promulgated in 2018, saying, “Please note that the records retention schedule is the retention plan under which the Office operates.”

“[W]hile agency file plans can be useful for agencies that directly administer large programs, and correspondingly administer many records (for example, unemployment records, public benefit applications and files, environmental permit applications and files, etc.), the ‘file plan’ is not always particularly useful in small agencies like the Office of the Governor,” Bonder said.

The first item on the first page of the retention schedule suggests “executive level documentation of Office activities” which “[m]ay include correspondence” should be retained for four years.

Another item on the retention schedule deals specifically with the governor’s Office of Legislative Affairs in which the accuser worked. It says administrative files — which could potentially be applicable to the accuser’s emails — should be retained for two years or until the end of the relevant legislative session, which would have been at the close of 2023. It’s not clear which of those guidelines would be supreme.

The Governor’s Office, however, has never given an indication of exactly when the accuser’s email account was deleted. Unless the entirety of her communications during that period was limited to routine scheduling or administrative minutiae — highly unlikely for a deputy in the legislative affairs office — those records should have been retained under classifications such as “Administrative Correspondence,” “Policy Research Files,” and “Legislative Affairs Files.”

The administration’s argument that only active RTK requests trigger preservation obligations fundamentally misrepresents the purpose of a retention schedule, which requires routine preservation of records based on content and function — not whether the public has yet requested them.