March 27, 2008

A Pattern of Hiding Things

Yesterday's story about that lawsuit filed against the Bredesen administration for ignoring multiple open-records requests for more than nine months reminded me of the scathing 187-page order handed down by a federal judge last fall ordering a "forensic inspection" of computers used by Gov. Phil Bredesen, Finance Commissioner Dave Goetz, and 158 other key custodians of records related to TennCare as part of a class action lawsuit against TennCare filed by the Tennessee Justice Center.

It seems the administration failed to give the TJC every document that they were supposed to hand over. The "forensic inspection" was deemed necessary to recover documents from the hard-drives documents that had been illegally deleted.

I seem to recall the Bredesen administration appealed the federal judge's order, delaying further the release of the documents, though I don't know if there has been a ruling on that appeal.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that Bredesen's Department of Finance & Administration has a pattern of trying to hide things and avoid complete compliance with open records requests - and that Gov. Bredesen, for all his public rhetoric about government transparency and ethics, allows it to go on unchecked.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive. I emailed a representative of the TJC asking about the status of the lawsuit, and got this response written by Gordon Bonnyman, the lawyer who heads the TJC.

The state did appeal, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the District Court's order. Although the State identified 160 as having information relevant to the TennCare program's treatment of children, the parties agreed that the search for relevant information would be confined to computers used by only 50 key custodians from that list. (The 50 included the Governor and his senior staff.) The District Court only required the imaging of those 50 custodians' computers, including any privately owned computers that were used for official state business.

The District Court was concerned with preserving relevant evidence and protecting it from further destruction. It has not decided yet what information relevant to the litigation must actually be produced from the computers, or what procedures will be used to safeguard the confidentiality of non-relevant information.

The Sixth Circuit heard arguments in the case last week. It will probably be 1 - 3 months before there is a ruling.

While we await the ruling, we still don't have an answer to the question, "What is the Bredesen administration trying so hard to keep hidden?" And now we can ask the same question about their refusal to comply with legitimate open-records requests from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.