Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Bart Hinkle is one of the region’s shining editorial lights. But on the matter of Ken Cuccinelli’s request for documents in the Michael Mann/UVA imbroglio, I think he’s off base. Principled, to be sure. But his column doesn’t go nearly deep enough in its exploration of what Mann’s defenders inside and outside the University of Virginia are doing to thwart the commonwealth’s freedom of information laws.
In his latest column he makes several appeals to authority to justify why former UVA professor Michael Mann’s work product while a state employee at the very public Universitry of Virginia should remain beyond the Attorney General’s investigatory powers.
He makes a compelling case. Even those who disagree with Mann’s research, and have taken great pains to show it is wrong, believe Cuccinelli is on a fishing expedition, or worse, has set himself up as some sort of modern day Torquemada:
Indeed he should. In the AG’s eyes, he does have such grounds. In our interview with him in March, Cuccinelli reiterated that the Albemarle county judge Hinkle cites didn’t toss the subpoena the AG’s office issued, but limited it, and in doing so, added a new subsection to the law in question. The judge’s action is before the Virginia Supreme Court. In the meantime, the AG’s office has refiled a request consistent with the lower court judge’s ruling. The University of Virginia has “objected to that subpoena” as well.
So no matter in what form Cuccinelli asks for the documents, the University objects. It would seem their problem is with the law itself, not Cuccinelli. This brings into question this part of Bart’s column:
Good heavens, Bart. Without straw men, three quarters of the nation’s pundits would be out of work.
So long as UVA fights even a limited subpoena tailored to the specifications issued by a friendly judge, we have to wonder what the school’s motivation really is. On the surface, it appears they object to releasing any information Mann generated to anyone at all.
As Chris Horner told us in a recent interview, his request for Mann’s documents under the Freedom of Information Act is being fought as well, and by the same groups fighting the PR war against Cuccinelli. None of these groups, including the ACLU, lifted a finger when Greenpeace asked for former UVA climate scientist Pat Michaels’ work product. They uttered not a peep, and certainly issued no press releases, when Michaels was hounded out of his post as state climatologists by the Kaine administration for holding unorthodox climate change views.
But as to the matter of a blanket exemption for academics from either Cuccinelli or FOIA…that’s what the groups backing Mann are asking for:
In addition, the Virginia FOIA statute expressly provides an exemption for “data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty or staff of public institutions of higher education . . . in the conduct of or as a result of research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issues . . . where such data, records or information has not been publicly released, published, copyrighted or patented.”
That’s quite a comfy blanket, particularly as it allows the University wide discretion to decide what might fall under FOIA. As Horner noted, “Apparently this is an objection of convenience, and is therefore not serious.” Indeed, FOIA is important to these groups, but only if your views dovetail with theirs.
Referring to the school’s legal bill, Horner thinks UVA has given us 500,000 reasons to believe Mann has something to hide. Had the University spent the same amount defending Michaels, the left would have howled that he was hiding something and UVA was wasting precious resources defending a charlatan.
in the end, this whole affair leaves us in quite a pickle. If we open the documents, we’ve embraced politically-motivated prosecutions. If they remain sealed, we will never know whether Mann did anything illegal. If even the narrowed subpoena or the FOIA are unsuccessful, the laws upon which they are based become irrelevant.
So which alternative will it be?
