Jeb Bush says he's going to release 250,000 emails from his time as Florida's governor. (Photo by World Affairs Council of Philadelphia/ Flickr)

Jeb Bush says he’s going to release 250,000 emails from his time as Florida’s governor. (Photo by World Affairs Council of Philadelphia/ Flickr)

By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Former Florida governor and possible presidential candidate Jeb Bush is going to release about a quarter million emails from his time in office.

Bush said it’s an effort to be transparent, but local and national media claim it’s a clear sign he’s seriously considering a run for president.

Bush told his plans to reporters for Miami’s ABC station, WPLG:

In what might be an indication of a prospective presidential run, Jeb Bush said he would release 250,000 emails from his time as Florida’s governor.

Bush made the announcement Saturday during an exclusive interview with Local 10 News.

The emails will be released as part of an e-book early next year, Bush said.

“I was digital before digital was cool, I guess,” Bush said. “Now it’s like commonplace.”

This comes amid speculation that Bush is preparing to announce plans to run for president in 2016.

“Part of serving or running, both of them, is transparency, to be totally transparent,” Bush said. “So I’ll let people make up their mind. There’s some funny ones. There’s some sad ones. There’s some serious ones.”

Bush said he would make up his mind on a 2016 bid for the Republican presidential nomination “in short order,” most likely after the New Year.

POLITICO predicts Bush’s plan is a way to control information ahead of possible opposition research if he does indeed run for president.

The move seems designed to get ahead of opposition researchers poring through his time in office — the Democratic research super PAC American Bridge already has started digging in on the candidates — but also to contrast Bush with people like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, both of whom have been accused of creating a fog of secrecy in their government offices.

Unlike the records of Christie and Clinton, Bush’s document trove is fairly dated — he was in office from 1999 to 2007. But the idea, he told WPLG-TV in Miami, is to create “transparency.” Bush was known as an active emailer while in office, often responding to queries himself.

He also said he’s working on an e-book that he’ll release next year.

Some Republicans remain skeptical that Bush will ultimately pull the trigger on a campaign. But he has committed more seriously to an exploration process than he ever has before and has said he will make up his mind soon.

Some insiders, though, worry that getting a thorough opposition file together for Bush is actually going to be pretty hard because he’s been out of office for such a long time.

The National Journal reported this week that a new report from left-leaning political research group American Bridge wrote a report about the current GOP field of candidates. The report, the Journal says, does not have quite as much dirt on Bush compared to others.

The report gives Bush less focus than other top-tier candidates, with seven pages … devoted to him, compared with 13 pages on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and 10 on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Brad Woodhouse, American Bridge’s current executive director, said the length of each chapter was partially determined how much recent information was publicly available.

Shauna Daly, a veteran Democratic strategist who spearheaded President Obama’s 2008 opposition research efforts and served as a senior adviser to American Bridge during the 2012 election, outlined the difficulty Bush poses for opposition researchers. “The last time I was at Bridge two years ago, the Jeb Bush file hadn’t been updated in a really long time,” Daly said, noting that private-sector records like those most sought out for Romney, and possibly Bush, are more cumbersome to unearth and sort than records from time spent in public office.

“I would say that Jeb is a pretty big challenge because all of his stuff is [Securities and Exchange Commission] filings and I would hope that people had begun to request that stuff a while ago, because once you get into [Freedom of Information Act requests], it takes a long time for those to come around,” Daly said. “With Romney, people had been requesting that stuff for years. If you don’t have a head start on that it would be difficult.”

Bush’s statement is also potentially embarrassing for Gov. Rick Scott, who has been accused of withholding emails showing he was conducting state business on a private email account. A judge ordered the release of the emails during a lawsuit. His administration is also accused of waiting until after the election to respond to public records requests from the media..

Whether or not Bush’s timing was on purpose is unclear.

However, Bush’s emails could provide some more after-the-fact information about the state’s executive branch in those years.

UPDATE: Jeb Bush announced via Facebook shortly after this post was published that he has “decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.”

He also wrote: “In January, I also plan to establish a Leadership PAC that will help me facilitate conversations with citizens across America to discuss the most critical challenges facing our exceptional nation. The PAC’s purpose will be to support leaders, ideas and policies that will expand opportunity and prosperity for all Americans. In the coming months, I hope to visit with many of you and have a conversation about restoring the promise of America.”