Debbie Crane has a new job.

The former N.C. Department of Health and Human Services information director fired at the direction of Gov. Mike Easley's office started work June 20 at the North Carolina offices of The Nature Conservancy, a private non-profit, Michael Biesecker reports.

A public information officer with the state for 18 years, Crane was fired in early March amid fallout from an N&O investigation of the state's mental-health system.

After her dismissal, she ignited an ongoing controversy by disclosing that she and other public information officers had been directed to delete e-mails to and from Easley's office every day.

"I'm loving this place," Crane said of her new job. "My blood pressure is lower and I feel like I'm doing good work."

Debbie Crane said the Carolina Journal shouldn't have to ask to get its calls returned.

Gov. Mike Easley acknowledged last week that his press staff doesn't return calls from the newspaper because the governor's staff considers it an advocacy group. Crane, a fired spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said advocacy group or not, the journal and every other member of the public has a right to public information.

Crane had previously said public information officers for other state agencies were also told not to deal with the Journal, which is owned by the John Locke Foundation.

"The name of those offices for the most part was public information offices or public affairs offices," Crane told N&O reporters today. "That means it doesn't matter who is doing the calling they deserve a call back and they deserve their information."

Crane spoke to N&O staff members today about public records and the best ways to get them from state government.

Easley told Carolina Journal editor Richard Wagner last week that he would have the newspaper removed from the do-not-call-list if the press association would write a letter vouching for the paper. Crane said that should be unnecessary. She allowed that the governor's public information office focuses on the news media, but other offices in state government are supposed to respond to the public.

Full disclosure: Crane signed an affidavit in support of a lawsuit against the governor by news organizations, including The N&O.

Update: The governor's office has directed state public information officers to treat the Carolina Journal the same as other news media, said Dan Gerlach, a senior aide to Easley.

Debbie Crane took issue today with Gov. Mike Easley's characterization of her actions as the chief spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Human Services.

Crane, who was fired from the post, said she didn't withhold any records of Carmen Hooker Odom's purported opposition as DHHS secretary to the 2001 reforms. Among other things, she said, the governor's office had asked her to find a copy of a speech that Hooker Odom never gave, reports Matthew Eisley.

"There were no documents because the woman didn't oppose mental-health reform," Crane said. "They don't exist. You can't create something if it doesn't exist."

Crane, who has been job-hunting, said she's considering showing up for work tomorrow at her old office.

"If they can't agree on who fired me," she said, "maybe I still have a job."

Who fired Debbie Crane?

In a meeting with newspaper editors Wednesday at the Executive Mansion, Gov. Mike Easley offered a new take on the recent firing of Crane, a former spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Human Services, reports Matthew Eisley.

Easley said Crane’s firing wasn’t his idea, which contradicts the accounts of others involved.

“It wasn’t me,” he insisted.

Crane, 48, was fired March 4 amid the political fallout of a News & Observer investigation into failures of the state’s mental-health system. Her dismissal revolved around the Easley administration’s attempts to persuade Carmen Hooker Odom, the former health and human services secretary, to talk with The News & Observer about what the administration says was her opposition to 2001 mental-health reforms.

Easley on Wednesday said DHHS fired Crane at the urging of the governor’s chief of staff because she had inappropriately talked Hooker Odom out of being interviewed and she failed to produce agency documents.

Read more after the jump.

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Gov. Mike Easley today launched a "comprehensive review" of how his administration handles e-mail messages.

Easley announced that he has asked Franklin Freeman, one of his senior assistants, to lead a panel to review policies dealing with the retention of e-mail messages under the state's public record law. Easley said the review will pertain to the governor's office and all agencies in his administration.

“Use of e-mail and other electronic forms of communication have expanded in ways that were not contemplated in 1993 during a major update of our state’s public records law in which I was involved when I was Attorney General,” Easley said in a statement.

“Some people use e-mail instead of the telephone and others use e-mail instead of a fax machine. It is important to look at our policies to be sure records that are public are treated as such.”

Easley said meetings of the review panel will be open, and that the panel will hold public hearings to get input on the issue.

Easley wants the panel to recommend any changes needed in policies or procedures, or if any changes in state law are needed. The panel is to make a preliminary report by May 20.

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Linda Daves, chairwoman of the N.C. Republican Party, is calling on Attorney General Roy Cooper to investigate claims that the governor's office directed state officials to destroy public records.

Daves sent a letter to Cooper today asking that he investigate claims by Debbie Crane, who was fired recently as the chief spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Human Services, that she and her counterparts at other state agencies were instructed to destroy e-mails they sent to the governor's office.

Daves also cited the comments this week by Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat, that he tossed away a letter he received from Carmen Hooker Odom, the former head of DHHS.

"The public records laws are a critical tool in making certain that a window into government is open so that we know our elected representatives are working judiciously on our behalf," Daves wrote in the letter.

Officials with Cooper's office could not immediately be reached for comment.

Update: Noelle Talley, a spokeswoman for Cooper, said the attorney general's office "has been examining these issues" since The N&O first raised the issue. She said that "comments now would be premature" because of the possibility of litigation over the matter.

But Talley, who said Cooper has not yet received the letter, indicated she was not surprised that Daves turned to Cooper for help. "Of course they would turn to Attorney General Cooper, who wrote most of the state's public records laws and is a leader on open government," she said.

Gov. Mike Easley has said repeatedly that Carmen Hooker Odom, former secretary of Health and Human Services, "vigorously" opposed mental health reform legislation when it was adopted in October 2001.

But that's not what Hooker Odom, who works for a nonprofit in New York City, said in an e-mail to The News & Observer in late February, reports Pat Stith.

Hooker Odom sent The N&O an e-mail message about her legislative "concerns" on Feb. 21 after talking with Debbie Crane, then the top public information office for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The newspaper didn't include the e-mail in its initial stories about mental health reform because it didn't show that Hooker Odom had opposed the reform bill.

Hooker Odom said in the e-mail that she had four concerns about the mental health reform legislation when it was being considered. But she said legislators amended the bill to eliminate two of those concerns, and she ignored a third directive.

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Laura Leslie says Mike Easley's explanation doesn't add up.

In a post on Dome yesterday, Governor Easley was quoted saying he had received a handwritten letter from former N.C. Health and Human Services Secretary Carmen Hooker Odom explaining why she didn't want to meet with the press, but he threw it away.

On Isaac Hunter's Tavern, the WUNC reporter says she doesn't get it: 

Hold on. You're in the middle of a firestorm over the collapse of the state’s mental health system. You fire a longtime, highly-respected agency spokesperson for, you say, convincing the former agency head not to talk to the press. You get a letter from that agency head in which she explains why she doesn't want to talk to the press. You throw the letter away.  

Leslie says that the letter, as he describes it, presumably would have backed up Easley's complaint about spokesman Debbie Crane, whom he fired.

"Am I the only one to whom this makes no sense?" she writes. "Or am I missing something here?"

Gov. Mike Easley's chief legal counsel today declined to comment on the letter he wrote this week saying that "absolutely no evidence" exists to support a former public affairs director's claim that the governor's communications staff directed public information officials in executive branch agencies to destroy e-mails after sending them to the governor's office.

In a brief interview, Chief Legal Counsel Reuben F. Young declined to say whether the governor's press aides had denied telling the agency spokespeople to kill e-mails, or what he meant by saying there was no evidence it happened, reports Dan Kane.

Young repeatedly referred all questions to the governor's communications staff.

"I understand your question and I'm not giving you a hard time here," Young said. "I just want you to understand my response and that is I will refer you to the press office."

More after the jump.

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Jack Betts says Mike Easley made his problems worse.

On his This Old State blog, the Charlotte Observer editor writes that the governor mishandled his response to a series of stories on mental health reform in the News & Observer, especially at a recent press conference.

It was a bad setup from the start, and resulted in the governor avoiding follow-up questions from writers who authored the series — and who seemed to know more about what was going on than the governor. And when it ended after a relatively few questions, reporters who staked out a building exit hoping to get in more questions found that the governor had ducked out another way and was gone.

Betts says firing spokeswoman Debbie Crane was also a miscalculation — "a symbol of a botched process start to finish."