Transparency News 5/6/16
State and Local Stories
Taxpayers have spent $3.7 million and counting on private attorneys in three redistricting lawsuits, as well as a fourth case targeting the state's voter ID law. That includes nearly $180,000 billed so far by a state senator's law firm, which represents her colleagues from both sides of the aisle in their ongoing effort to keep secret emails about the 2011 drawing of election maps. Those four state senators, as well as two former ones, each face $100 daily fines for not complying with a court order to turn those documents over. Unless a pending appeal before the state Supreme Court succeeds, taxpayers will be liable for the fines. The bills have piled up for a number of reasons. The General Assembly's Republican majority doesn't trust Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring to represent them, and chamber leaders hired private firms with expertise in a niche area of the law.
Daily Press
Loudoun County resident Dimitri Kesari, a former campaign operative for Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and a current member of Hamilton Town Council, was found guilty in an Iowa federal courtroom today on several public corruption charges related to a pay-for-support plot in the 2012 presidential election, the Des Moines Register is reporting. Kesari was found guilty of conspiracy, guilty of causing false records and guilty of false statements. Two of his campaign colleagues were also found guilty in the scheme that involved payments to an Iowa state senator for that senator, Kent Sorenson, to switch his endorsement from then-candidate Michelle Bachmann to Paul shortly before the Iowa caucuses in 2012.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
National Stories
When I’m having trouble getting public records from a government agency, I’ll often turn to my colleagues for advice or just to vent. But sometimes, you need to take your struggle public. That’s what New York City reporter Joaquin Sapien did last month. After spending nearly a year trying to get records from the city and exchanging more than 50 emails with a freedom of information officer, he finally had enough. On April 21, he posted a story on ProPublica with a headline that captured his frustration: “Foiled by FOIL: How One City Agency Has Dragged Out a Request for Public Records for Nearly a Year.”
Poynter
The Facebook page of a former mayor is public record, says a New Mexico court. Now she needs to figure out how to reactivate the account, which has been shut down. “Hopefully everything is still there,” Stephen Thies, the Alamogordo City attorney, told the Santa Fe New Mexican. The city previously denied an individual’s request to examine the Facebook page set up by Susie Galea, who resigned as Alamogordo’s mayor in December 2015, the Alamogordo Daily News reported. The social media account was not created for the city, lawyers argued, so it was not public record. Until the account is reactivated, 12th Judicial District Judge Jerry H. Ritter Jr. wrote in a ruling published last week, there’s no way to know if it includes public material as well as private.
ABA Journal
The infamous Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer,” speaking exclusively with Fox News, claimed he easily – and repeatedly – breached former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email server in early 2013. Marcel Lehel Lazar, who goes by the moniker “Guccifer,” claimed he was able to access the server – and provided extensive details about how he did it and what he found – over the course of a half-hour jailhouse interview and a series of recorded phone calls with Fox News.
Fox News
The administration of North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory has lost a round in its court fight against news organizations that contend the state has systematically defied its own public records law. That law requires that most government records be made available to the public as “promptly as possible.” But a lawsuit, filed by the Observer, the News & Observer of Raleigh, and several other news organizations and public interest groups, alleges that the administration has shown “patterns and practices of delay, obfuscation, non-responsiveness, foot-dragging and stonewalling.” McCrory and his administration had asked the court to dismiss the news organizations’ complaint.
Charlotte Observer
The Obama Administration has famously prosecuted more individuals for unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media than all of its predecessors combined. But behind the scenes, it appears to have sought administrative penalties for leaks -- rather than criminal ones -- with equal or greater vigor. "This Administration has been historically active in pursuing prosecution of leakers, and the Intelligence Community fully supports this effort," said ODNI General Counsel Robert S. Litt in testimony from a closed hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2012 that was released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Federation of American Scientists
Editorials/Columns
It should be astonishing to learn that Portsmouth city officials have destroyed reams of official documents, ignoring rules for the preservation of public records. It should be, but it is not. Portsmouth City Hall has been a bastion of mismanagement. Officials quite regularly project a reckless disregard for their responsibilities to the public and seem unconcerned by their obligation to keep citizens informed. It’s therefore little wonder that attitude is reflected in the keeping of records. Councilman Bill Moody offered a blunt and worrisome assessment when informed by the Pilot of the latest transgression: “Portsmouth has declared war on transparency, apparently on all levels.”
Virginian-Pilot
