Transparency News 3/26/14

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

State and Local Stories

A report on Austin Creigh “Gus” Deeds’ case finalized two weeks ago by the state’s top watchdog is being withheld from the public while authorities consider criminal charges, Virginia’s inspector general said Tuesday. The Office of the State Inspector General launched a review of the case, leading to the report completed March 10. State police that day asked that the document be withheld until its investigation is finished and prosecutors make a determination on whether to file criminal charges, Inspector General Michael Morehart said. Morehart acknowledged that he could not provide legal justification for withholding the document.
Daily Progress

Former Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife want separate trials on the federal corruption charges they both are facing, saying in court filings late Tuesday that a joint proceeding would prevent Maureen McDonnell, in particular, from taking the witness stand to exonerate her husband. The filings — which came on the same day that the couple’s attorneys asked a judge to toss the charges against them outright — suggest that Maureen McDonnell is willing to testify that her husband was largely in the dark about her interactions with Richmond businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., and that the couple could not have engaged in a conspiracy to lend the prestige of the governor’s office to Williams’s struggling dietary supplement company, Star Scientific.
Washington Post

Sandton Capital Partners will be allowed to place a credit bid on most, but not all, of The Free Lance–Star Publishing Co.’s assets. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin R. Huennekens made that ruling Tuesday following a two-day hearing in the FLS’ bankruptcy case. He has not yet set an amount that Sandton will be allowed to credit bid. Credit bids are frequently used in bankruptcy court. They typically allow secured lenders to bid the amount they are owed without putting up additional cash. Sandton purchased a loan from BB&T last summer that had been made to the FLS in 2007 to build Print Innovators, a commercial printing plant on Belman Road in Fredericksburg. The outstanding balance is about $38 million.
Free Lance-Star

Hundreds of Campbell County cemeteries now are accessible with the click of a button thanks to a CD from the Campbell County Historical Society that catalogues the names of people buried throughout the county’s history. The cemetery survey CD takes the place of the roughly 25 booklets the society has released over the past 20 to 30 years, detailing church, public and family cemeteries throughout the county. The CD also presents the information in alphabetical order, something the books didn’t do. The books were available for people to peruse at the library as well as purchase.
News & Advance

The appointed commonwealth’s attorney will stay on as prosecutor in the case that seeks to recall Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio (R-Sterling), but Delgaudio’s attorney has been limited in his subpoenas against several Loudoun residents. In court Tuesday, Judge Paul Sheridan, a retired Arlington County Circuit Court judge who was appointed by the Virginia Supreme Court to hear the case, denied a motion that sought to disqualify Arlington Commonwealth's Attorney Theo Stamos from prosecuting the case. John Flannery, the attorney for the group of Sterling residents that filed the recall petition against Delgaudio, motioned that Stamos be removed from the case because of past statements that she “didn't believe there was any reason to go forward with any investigation of Mr. Delgaudio.”
Leesburg Today

National Stories

Despite the growing number of laws that require publicly available health care pricing for consumers, most states fail the test of transparency, according to a new report from the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3). Even among states with strong laws requiring price information from all payers, that data is often inaccessible to the public, the nonprofit research group found. This year’s rankings focused more on whether states have All-Payer Claims Databases (APCD), which pool together price information from all commercial and public insurers in a state. At this point, 11 states have an APCD, five are currently implementing an APCD and another 21 states have shown a "strong interest" in creating one, according to the All-Payer Claims Database Council, a group of government, private and academic players that provide expertise on the subject.
Governing

The secretive U.S. court that considers applications for electronic surveillance and physical searches of non-U.S. targets will have a new presiding judge in May, the court said on Tuesday. Judge Thomas Hogan, who has been a federal judge in Washington, D.C., since 1982, will begin work as the presiding judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on May 19, the court said in a statement. U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has exclusive authority over the makeup of the 11-judge spy court, made the appointment.
Reuters

Prolific FOIA requester and MIT researcher Ryan Shapiro has been seeking information about the U.S. intelligence community’s role in the 1962 arrest and placement on the U.S. terror watchlist of Nelson Mandela. Following government agencies’ refusal to comply with his FOIA requests, Shapiro filed suit against the NSA, the FBI and and the Defense Intelligence Agency Tuesday, adding to an ongoing suit of the same nature against the CIA. While Shapiro aims in his research to explore the U.S.’s potentially historic role in undermining anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, he has been met with a series of disturbing roadblocks. The NSA, for example, invoked both the Espionage Act and “national defense” to deny Shapiro’s request for files.
Salon

Newly disclosed secret settlements between Iowa government and former public employees show that some of the workers believed they were subjected to discrimination, inappropriate behavior and retaliation for blowing the whistle on improper bidding practices. One of the workers who left state government but received a settlement was accused of failing to intervene when a fellow worker attacked a girl in state care. Yet another worker admitted sampling cinnamon vodka on the job. The accusations were contained in documents obtained by The Des Moines Register Monday after Gov. Terry Branstad revealed that 12 state agencies have made at least 24 secret settlements with current and former workers since he resumed office in January 2011.
Des Moines Register

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has moved to make public the identities of seven former Dewey & LeBoeuf staffers who have pleaded guilty to criminal charges in connection with an alleged accounting fraud that three former Dewey leaders and a fourth firm employee are accused of engineering. Responding to motions filed March 15 in state supreme court in Manhattan in which The New York Times asked that the cases involving six of the so-called Doe defendants be unsealed, Vance filed his own motion Monday rejecting the newspaper's push as invalid while urging the court to end the mystery over which ex-Dewey staffers may be preparing to testify against the four men charged March 6 with hatching a massive scheme that helped drive the firm into bankruptcy in May 2012.
American Lawyer

Two U.S. senators proposed legislation Tuesday that would require automakers to give regulators more information about deadly crashes and force the U.S. government to make that documentation more readily available to the public.
USA Today
 

Editorials/Columns

Any correspondence—whether written with pen on paper or with a computer or smartphone—sent or received by a locally elected official in Virginia about government business is a public record. That means Virginia residents can have access to that correspondence. It’s legally irrelevant if an email is sent or received on a government email account or someone’s personal email account.Actually, there is no legal requirement that a public body establish an email network for its elected officers.
Dick Hammerstrom, Free Lance-Star