Transparency News 6/26/14

Federal investigators looking into the surprise resignation of a key state senator have pulled a year's worth of documents from the state's tobacco commission, where the senator was once expected to take a job. Subpoenas released Wednesday through the state's Freedom of Information Act show that the U.S. Attorney's Office subpoenaed a broad swath of documents and correspondence. Investigators also demanded that Tim Pfohl, the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission's interim executive director, appear before a grand jury Tuesday in Abingdon.
Daily Press

Amherst County supervisors publicly discussing the contents of closed meetings may soon have roadblocks. Last week, the board authorized County Attorney Ellen Bowyer to draft revisions to the board’s rules of procedures governing closed sessions. The revisions would emphasize “the importance of confidentiality” during closed sessions as well as include the board’s responses to such violations. The motion follows earlier assertions by Supervisor Claudia Tucker that a closed session held in early June lacked transparency. A a meeting on June 17, Tucker read a statement clarifying her reasons for discussing her concerns about the closed session. She reiterated that school board discussions in the past always had been performed in open session.
New-Era progress

The little talked about Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission made headlines earlier this month when former state senator Phillip Puckett resigned and prepared to take a job with the group. The results of a five-month-old state inspector general report suggests a closer inspection of the commission might be warranted.
Watchdog.org Virginina Bureau

State Sen. Bill Stanley, who is representing Pittsylvania County in its three-year court battle over prayer, filed a motion last week asking a federal judge to lift the permanent injunction against the Board of Supervisors. The injunction, imposed in March 2013, prohibits supervisors from opening meetings with prayer associated with any one religion, which according to the trial court, had “the unconstitutional effect of affiliating the government” with a specific faith.
Star Tribune

National Stories

Two senators are proposing the most significant reforms to the Freedom of Information Act in four decades, including altering a key exemption that government agencies frequently use to deny access to a vast swath of executive branch documents. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and fellow panel member Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced legislation Tuesday that would allow the press and other public requesters to pierce the deliberative process privilege, a broad protection the courts give to records detailing the policymaking process as well as virtually any action leading up to any kind of decision by agency officials. In recent years, the provision — known as Exemption 5 — has been ridiculed by transparency advocates as the "withhold it because you want to" exception to FOIA.
Politico

Congressional investigators say they uncovered emails Wednesday showing that a former Internal Revenue Service official at the heart of the tea party investigation sought an audit involving a Republican senator in 2012. The emails show former IRS official Lois Lerner mistakenly received an invitation to an event that was meant to go to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. The name of the event organizer was blacked out on copies of the emails released by the House Ways and Means Committee because they were considered confidential taxpayer information. Grassley and his wife signed waivers allowing their names to be released.
News Virginian

Michigan Governor Snyder has signed laws exempting gun records from the state's Freedom of Information Act. The information will still be available to law enforcement officials for certain purposes, but there are new restrictions on when police can access the records. A log of who accessed the records, and the reason for doing so, is also now required by the new laws.
9&10 News

In a sweeping victory for privacy rights in the digital age, the Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously ruled that the police need warrants to search the cellphones of people they arrest. While the decision will offer protection to the 12 million people arrested every year, many for minor crimes, its impact will most likely be much broader. The ruling almost certainly also applies to searches of tablet and laptop computers, and its reasoning may apply to searches of homes and businesses and of information held by third parties like phone companies.
New York Times

An attorney seeking the release of records on the alleged 20th Sept. 11 hijacker, who is being held in Guantanamo Bay, told a federal appellate panel Wednesday that the government's justification for withholding images of Mohammed al-Qahtani is so broad as to be meaningless under the Freedom of Information Act.
New York Law Journal
 

Editorials/Columns

People who comment anonymously on the Internet have First Amendment protections—unless those comments are defamatory or dishonest. At least, that’s what the Virginia Court of Appeals seems to be saying in a case headed to the Virginia Supreme Court on appeal. The issue—under what circumstances anonymous commenters can be unmasked—is being watched closely by news organizations and other outlets that have an interest in continuing vigorous commenting on their websites.
Dick Hammerstrom, Free Lance-Star

In Gainesville, Fla., it doesn’t take a Freedom of Information request to find out what city officials are chattering about on email. One merely has to go online and read them. That city recently began posting email correspondence about public business to and from the mayor and the city commissioners. There may be other localities doing it as well, but this is the first one that’s been brought to my attention. The technology already exists for local governments in Virginia to do the same thing. They’d simply have to make a policy decision: Do they want the public’s business shared with the public. 
Dick Hammerstrom, Free Lance-Star

So just to review: In the past few days … The head of the IRS essentially told Republican congressional investigators to go climb a rope. The U.S. Archivist said the IRS broke the law by not informing his office that it had lost Lois Lerner’s emails. The public learned that six other IRS employees’ emails also mysteriously vanished. The IRS agreed to pay $50,000 to the conservative National Organization for Marriage because an employee improperly disclosed its list of donors to a gay-rights group. (This follows last year’s revelation that the IRS had turned over confidential tax information about conservative groups to the liberal ProPublica — a revelation, The Washington Post noted at the time, “contradicts previous statements from the agency.”) Barroom wits occasionally say IRS stands for “Infernal Revenue Service.” The gag wasn’t very funny to begin with. These days it hardly seems like a joke at all.
Times-Dispatch

While we’re focusing on the new scandal regarding a government agency with a recognizable acronym — the VA — let’s not forget about the old scandal regarding the IRS. These two slip-ups — allowing private information to go public and failing to provide investigatory information that should have gone public — are not the primary issues in the IRS scandal. But they add to the growing evidence of the agency’s failures and raise further doubt about its credibility.
Daily Progress

Virginia needs a new sign. When visitors enter the commonwealth after driving across bridges that span the Potomac, they ought to see banners proclaiming, “Welcome to New Jersey.” It turns out that the so-called Virginia Way is not all that different from politics in states with unseemly reputations. Virginia’s image has taken a beating in recent years. In a state noted for sound management and fiscal prudence, budget stalemates threaten to become routine. Giftgate may not rise to the level of actual corruption, but it does not flatter Virginia’s M.O. Circumstances relating to U.S. 460 raise questions regarding Virginia’s approach to transportation projects. The Port of Virginia has not performed as smoothly as it should. This year’s General Assembly failed to enact substantive ethics reform. The absence of a merit-based process in judicial selection contributed to the smarmy story of Democratic Sen. Phil Puckett, whose resignation might have cleared the way for his daughter’s appointment to the bench even as it flipped the Senate to Republicans, who promptly killed Marketplace Virginia. Republicans and Democrats alike practice a gerrymandering that distorts elections in legislative districts. Now this.
Times-Dispatch 

We don't doubt that there are those who do abuse the Illinois FOIA process, but, at the same time, no one should doubt that many government officials deeply resent having to let the public in on the public's business. This legislation comes across as more of a defense of the desire of government to keep the public's business to itself than anything else.
News-Gazette

Can Eric Knudsen, the creator of the fictional character “Slender Man,” be held civilly liable for the recent violence suffered by the young victim of a stabbing attack in Waukesha, Wis.? The answer is a definitive “no” under First Amendment principles of free speech. Those rules were created by the United States Supreme Court 45 years ago in a case that protected a Ku Klux Klan member from responsibility for engaging in racist rhetoric at a cross-burning in Ohio.
Clay Calvert, Star-Exponent