Gov. Beverly Perdue today declined to take steps to make public an internal state Highway Patrol investigation into missing records pertaining to her predecessor's travels in 2005.

Patrol officials say the internal affairs investigation, the second of two internal probes into the missing records, cleared a patrol supervisor involved in the records' disappearance, Capt. Alan Melvin. But neither the patrol or its boss, state Crime Control Secretary Reuben Young, are making the report public.

They cite state law that keeps most personnel matters secret. But the law includes an exemption for the release of personnel records when an agency's integrity is in question.

Perdue did not directly answer a reporter's question as to whether she would order the report released. She suggested she did not have the legal authority to do so.

"I'm not a lawyer," said Perdue, a New Bern Democrat. "I'm trying to follow the rules of the law ... I'm constantly told this is privileged information."

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The state Highway Patrol said today that it has turned over to federal authorities a computer that once contained records regarding then Gov. Mike Easley's air travels that are now missing.

The computer had been assigned to Diane Bumgardner, a patrol secretary who works for the governor's security detail, Dan Kane reports.

On Friday, the patrol released an internal report of the missing records in which Bumgardner said the captain who oversaw the detail, Alan Melvin, had told her to download three years of flight records to a computer disk, give it to him and then delete the files from her computer.

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