During the corona crisis, Prime Minister Mark Rutte also has text messages with the then Minister of Health Hugo de Jonge (CDA) cleared. That reports de Volkskrant after an appeal to the Government Information (Public Access) Act (Wob). The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) says it has archived the messages destroyed by Rutte, but the content has been declared secret.
Read also: Rutte himself determined which text messages were important and which were not – and that is a problem
An inventory list from VWS shows that between March 2020 and June 2020 there was iMessage traffic between Rutte and De Jonge. It is not known what the content of those messages is, but the Ministry of VWS states in a joint statement with the Ministry of General Affairs de Volkskrant know that the SMS contact was not about the face mask deal with Sywert van Lienden. According to VWS, there is material that has not been made public before.
Reported in May this year de Volkskrant that Rutte deleted the messages on his phone on a daily basis for years. In response, he said he always forwarded important messages to officials to keep and delete the rest. The fact that the prime minister himself determined what he should and should not keep was met with a lot of criticism in the House of Representatives.
At the beginning of October, the Government Information and Heritage Inspectorate ruled that Rutte had violated the Archives Act by erasing text messages. The prime minister disagrees, insisting that he has followed the law and also ‘the spirit of the law’. He now archives all his messages.