By Jim Schutze

On March 5, Bethany Erickson and Tim Rogers at D Magazine reported that 5,000 pages of Dallas city staff emails related to tearing down Dallas City Hall had come into the possession of Dallas Morning News columnist Robert Wilonsky.

Ouch. For Wilonsky to get his hands on the emails was galling for the people at D. Their own writer, Steven Monacelli, had requested the same tranche of emails and was still being stalled by the City.

Wilonsky, for his part, refused to acknowledge that he had received the emails. A classic newspaper farce ensued in which the Morning News published a series of stories talking about the emails – one of the best was by Wilonsky – without ever admitting that they had them.

How could they know what was in them if they didn't have their hands on them? Was it one of those teleporting things?

It was a perplexing and frustrating situation. A certain pressure began to grow in the online social media world, which we might even characterize as a chant: Emails! Emails! We want the emails!

Last week, CBS11 News succeeded in prying loose a portion, but not all, of the 5,000 pages of emails. The City asked the Texas Attorney General to shield it from having to release the rest of them and said it had something to do with "homeland security". And, sure. What doesn't, these days?

The emails presented on this web page are a tranche of documents obtained last week from the City Secretary by Dallas District 14 City Council Member Paul Ridley, who was kind enough to forward them to me upon my request.

I don't know which tranche these are. Are they the Wilonsky tranche that he maybe did or maybe didn't ever receive? The CBS11 tranche? Or just some rando tranche?

My partner on this page, the intrepid Avi Adelman, has looked at them more closely than I have, and he tells me they look like somebody copied everything in his wastebasket on a Friday afternoon. In other words, red herrings, not the genuine item.

But that in itself would be interesting. If City staff actually went to the trouble of manufacturing a massive release of misleading documents, then that's one more important clue to the kind of city staff we have. Good to know.

Anyway, let's all take a gander and see what we come up with. One way or the other, the exercise may usefully inform our opinions.