State Attorney Wilie Meggs is planning to seek a search warrant to examine Rep. Ray Sansom's laptop, according to a just-released investigative report.

Meggs took action after the Florida House said it was not able to recover Sansom's e-mails from April 2007 -- when Northwest Florida State College Bob Richburg brought up the idea for an airport building in Destin.

"We did learn that Representative Sansom's state issued laptop was assigned to him September 25, 2006, which was before the appropriation for the Destin Center," the report reads.

The laptop was turned over on May 7, 2009. A search warrant will have to be executed before the Florida Department of Law Enforcement does the "forensic exam."

The Legislature did not apply to itself some of the open records laws that state agencies and local government must follow. The House has said it has a regular process for deleting e-mails from servers, but individual members can keep e-mail on their own computers.

(photo: Not Sansom's actual computer but the same Dell D820 model)

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