Transparency News 5/26/16

State and Local Stories

Two days after CNN reported that he is under a federal investigation, Gov. Terry McAuliffe went on the radio Wednesday and said the network's reporters "were sold a bag of goods" and decried leaks from the U.S. Justice Department.
Virginian-Pilot

About 40 employees and supporters of Nexus Services protested at City Hall Wednesday morning. The protesters denounced an email that contained an emoji depicting Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and was sent from a part-time city employee’s email account. Emails published by Nexus on May 18 show that the email, which were about Nexus and sent in early March, came from business auditor Gene R. Ergenbright’s account. It went to an Augusta County employee’s account. City spokeswoman Mary-Hope Vass has confirmed the emails came from Ergenbright’s official city email address and computer. Ergenbright is also a part-time employee in the Augusta County Commissioner of the Revenue’s Office. Michael Donovan, Nexus CEO, said the company received copies of the emails as part of a Freedom of Information Act request to Augusta County for documents related to Nexus or its executives.
Daily News Record

A state audit of BVU Authority is in its third week and expected to continue for the foreseeable future. DeAnn Compton and three other staff members from the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts are working daily at BVU’s Lee Highway facility, just as they have for most of this month. The comprehensive audit was mandated by state legislation to reconfigure the authority board and comes in the wake of an ongoing federal corruption investigation that has seen nine former executives, board chairmen and vendors convicted on felony charges. Compton briefed current board members about their work this week.
Bristol Herald Courier

The publication of names and addresses of delinquent taxpayers in The Southwest Times is “very helpful” in aiding collection of unpaid taxes. For the tax years ending 2013, more than $84,000 – $84,469 – in deliquent real estate taxes were collected from Feb. 28 through May 20 after the names, legal locations and delinquency amounts for taxpayers were published in The Southwest Times.
Southwest Times

The Alexandria City Council agreed Tuesday night to what it described as a code of ethics and conduct that is “aspirational in nature,” without legal penalty. The measure, passed by a unanimous vote, requires a once-per-term public pledge to act ethically and a public conversation, dialogue or seminar on ethics every three years. Silberberg (D) originally wanted to set up an ethics advisory commission to handle citizens’ complaints and impose a state-level audit of the personal financial disclosures that elected officials in the city are required to make. Such actions, she argued, would make the city a national leader in government ethics. In its vote Tuesday, the all-Democratic council excluded appointed officials from its new pledge and code of conduct. They also tussled over the downsides of avoiding “the appearance of a conflict of interest,” saying that what appears to be a conflict to partisans on one side of a debate may not actually be a conflict in the eyes of the council member.
Washington Post



National Stories
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The State Department’s inspector general on Wednesday sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying that she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had. The report, delivered to members of Congress, undermined some of Mrs. Clinton’s previous statements defending her use of the server and handed her Republican critics, including the party’s presumptive nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, new fodder to attack her just as she closes in on the Democratic nomination. The inspector general found that Mrs. Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with department officials but that, contrary to her claims that the department “allowed” the arrangement, there was “no evidence” she had requested or received approval for it.
New York Times
Six key excerpts from the State Department report on Clinton’s emails
USA Today

The University of Kentucky violated state law when it denied a request for details of meetings held by a committee that decides doctors’ salaries, the Kentucky attorney general’s office has ruled. According to a May 19 opinion from Andy Beshear’s office, the UK HealthCare Compensation Planning Committee is a public agency and “failed to meet its statutorily assigned burden of proving it conducted an adequate search for requested meeting minutes.” The attorney general’s office rejected UK General Counsel William Thro’s argument that a court has previously determined that the attorney general is not authorized to review a denial of records based on their stated nonexistence.
Lexington Herald Leader


Editorials/Columns

Redistricting that protects incumbents of the party in power—known as gerrymandering—has been done in Virginia for generations, with Democrats of legislatures past just as guilty of the practice as today’s Republicans. It is, in fact, embarrassing that Virginia lawmakers cannot be trusted to level the districting playing field on their own, forcing the federal government to do the job for them.
Free Lance-Star

Against a backdrop in which Facebook employees say they secretly manipulated conservatives’ posts and the Internal Revenue Service has been exposed for subjecting conservative groups to extra scrutiny, damaging the credibility of major entities in both the private public sectors, at least you can say that the FBI is playing it down the middle. The federal investigators are now looking into Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s campaign and inaugural donations, after having previously drilled into Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell’s relationship with a businessman who kept his family supplied with gifts.
Daily Progress

Virginia’s been down this road before; please help us if we have to do it again. We’re talking, of course, about an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section of a sitting governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. It would be the height of foolishness to speculate about the investigation, especially with as few details as we now know. But it distresses us to no end that the second governor in a row is now wrapped up in a federal probe. Virginia has always had a reputation for squeaky-clean politics and a well-run government. Our public servants — both Democrats and Republicans — have been above reproach, for the most part. And while we strongly favored tightening the state’s ethics laws in the wake of the McDonnell scandal, at some point you have to recognize the fact that moral behavior can’t be legislated, that it must be part of the individual’s character.
News & Advance

Another custom that has disappeared was major news outlets having real reporters who wanted to really follow a story, not simply report what was fed to them as fact. Many in the 70’s went into journalism to break the big stories. They had grown up with the breaking stories from Watergate, which made reporters Woodward and Bernstein famous. They were inspired by the Lou Grant television series where reporters were sent out to dig out the real stories. Today, it appears that reporters are simply on the job to get a paycheck. They are either unwilling to do the hard work of learning the real facts in which they are reporting or our schools of journalism are so poorly training them that those reporters simply do not know how to research a story. And still a third possibility is that either they or their employer is so biased that they will only parrot those facts that reinforce their biases.
Sen. Frank Ruff, Chatham Star-Tribune