HOUSTON -- The Harris County attorney is trying to determine if the sheriff's office broke the law with a new policy that intentionally deleted thousands of e-mails, KPRC Local 2 Investigates reported Thursday.

The new policy says that all e-mails older than 14 days will be automatically deleted. It’s a policy change that came just days before investigators with the Attorney General’s office showed up at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center to go through the district attorney’s e-mails.

On Jan 8, all of Harris County got a look at District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal’s e-mails, which contained pornography, racist jokes and love notes to his assistant. We now know it was the very next day that Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas changed his department’s e-mail retention policy.

“We have 4,000 users in our system,” said Thomas. “If these e-mails sit there, it would shut our system down.”

It was over the weekend, without notice, that all of the inboxes of Sheriff’s Department employees were cleaned out, leaving only the last two weeks of mail.

Lloyd Kelley, the attorney suing Harris County in a federal police brutality case that prompted the attorney general investigation into Rosenthal’s e-mails, said it’s no coincidence the sheriff picked last week to implement the new policy.

“You can’t have a sudden overnight decision to get rid of these documents when they know the investigators are coming. That’s Arthur Anderson in a nutshell,” Kelley said.

Kelley said the Texas Government Code makes it clear that Thomas can’t carte blanche delete every e-mail. And Harris County Attorney Mike Stafford told Local 2 that Kelley may be right.

“That’s where we come into play,” explained Stafford of his office of legal experts.

He said his office will make sure that any statutes and laws regarding elected officials retention policies are followed.

Investigative reporter Amy Davis asked Thomas, “Did you consult with anyone before you decided to delete all those e-mails?”

“I did not,” answered Thomas. “One of my staffers did consult with an assistant county attorney and I relayed that to Mr. Stafford earlier.”

After a cursory review of the state statute, Stafford did say that it appears Thomas’ policy may be “overbroad’ or too far-reaching.

The statute makes a distinction between different types of documents, no matter how they are sent, whether U.S. mail, e-mail or fax. Certain types of correspondence must be retained longer than 14 days.