On Saturday, Mitt Romney again defended his aides' decision to purchase their government-issued hard drives and erase official emails as Romney finished out his run as governor of Massachusetts in 2006.

MSNBC reports that the GOP contender claimed that the staffers' hard drives may have contained confidential information, and that "putting it in the public domain would be violating their trust."

The Boston Globe reported on Thursday that at the tail end of Romney's governorship, his aides decided to purchase the hard drives that had been officially issued to them, then erased all their official emails from a server. Computers in the office were replaced before Deval Patrick assumed the governorship in 2007, leaving no trace of Romney's electronic communications while in charge of the state.