Howard Dean's decision to seal some of his gubernatorial papers for a decade was legal, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The ruling overturned a finding by a state trial judge last year that neither Dean nor the secretary of state had the authority to seal the documents.
Dean and the secretary of state agreed when Dean left office in 2003 to seal until 2013 roughly 93 boxes of papers that he considered sensitive.
Past Vermont governors had sealed portions of their papers, though for
not as long.
"We didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time in any future endeavor," Dean told reporters at the time.
He later said he made the comment in jest, but as his 2004 presidential campaign took off, opponents began calling on him to open up the documents, and the Washington-based group Judicial Watch sued to gain access to the papers.
"Dean's political aspirations and his desire to prevent anything from ruining them are not sound arguments for secreting such an enormous quantity of government documents from the public," Judicial Watch President Thomas Fitton said at the time.
Dean, who served as governor from 1991 to 2003, is now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
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