What happened to Mike Huckabee’s gubernatorial records?

As Mike Huckabee considers a second run for the White House, a lingering question remains from his 2008 campaign that is bound to resurface if he chooses to launch a 2012 bid: What happened to Huckabee's records from when he was governor of Arkansas?

As Mother Jones's Siddartha Mahanta reminds, Huckabee in 2006 ordered the destruction of the hard drives of 83 state-owned computers and four servers containing records dating back over his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor.

At the time, Huckabee, who was then plotting his first bid for the White House, defended the move as "standard operating procedure." In an op-ed published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Huckabee wrote that he had been advised by state officials to crush the drives to prevent personal information—like employees' Social Security numbers—from being accessed when the computers were put to new uses.

The state ethics committee later cleared Huckabee of any wrongdoing, while two subsequent lawsuits over the matter were dismissed.

Still, the mystery remains over what exactly was on the disks that Huckabee had destroyed. The former governor has repeatedly maintained copies of the records on the disks either were given to his predecessor, Gov. Mike Beebe, or placed into storage with the rest of his gubernatorial papers, which are set to be archived at his alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University.

But Beebe's office says they don't have the records. According to Mother Jones, a FOIA request the magazine recently filed seeking copies of Huckabee's travel records, calendars, emails and call logs from his days as governor was recently denied by the state.

"Former Governor Huckabee did not leave behind any hard-copies of the types of documents you seek. Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been 'cleaned' and physically destroyed," Tim Gauger, Beebe's chief legal counsel, said in a letter to the magazine.

Meanwhile, some of Huckabee's records are at OBU, but the public won't be seeing them anytime soon. As Mother Jones reports, because of a funding snag, Huckabee's gubernatorial archive won't open for public consumption until after the 2012 campaign.

(Photo of Huckabee: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)