[T]he House delayed a vote on a controversial resolution that asked the attorney general to release emails from the governor’s office prior to 2013.
Rep. Chris Pearson, P-Burlington, introduced the resolution, H.R. 21, on Thursday. The resolution would have pressured the Attorney General’s office to allow Gov. Peter Shumlin’s administration to release correspondence that it previously requested to delete.
“I frankly struggle to understand why this is tough or causing a lot of confusion maybe, or dustup,” Pearson said on the House Floor. “This is a resolution, so it’s a statement for projecting our values. It’s not got the weight of the law.”
The House ultimately delayed the vote. Because of the Passover holiday Friday, House Majority Leader Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, D-Bradford, suggested lawmakers should vote for a substitute resolution. Rep. Kurt Wright, R-Burlington, moved to delay action until Tuesday.
The emails Pearson wants released were sent and received in 2013 or earlier. One of the email users, Alex MacLean, was a top aide to Shumlin and left her job in order to promote economic development projects in the Northeast Kingdom that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission now alleges were part of a “Ponzi-like” scheme.
The Shumlin administration says there are two batches of emails–one that is exempt from public records law because of a litigation hold, and another that was going to be deleted because they were more than three years old. Pearson’s amendment seeks to release the old emails, not the ones under litigation hold.
On Friday at about 5 p.m., the Shumlin administration released some of the old emails.
H.R. 21 says the emails should be released “because the damage to the public’s trust in government that the attempted deletion has caused far outweighs any speculative harm that release of the e-mails might cause to pending court cases.”
The resolution came about a week after VTDigger reported that Shumlin’s attorney, Sarah London, asked the Department of Information and Innovation to delete all archived emails for top staffers, including MacLean, who worked for the governor before January 2013.
Documents show that the state archivist and secretary of state both said the request was out of compliance with state statutes. After VTDigger reported on the matter, the Shumlin administration said the emails were unrelated to the alleged fraud case, and they wanted to release emails that were not subject to litigation hold.
Scott Coriell, the spokesperson for Shumlin opposed Pearson’s resolution, on Twitter. He said that on Thursday, Pearson “plotted how to grandstand” and that he “has no idea what he is talking about.”
.@RepCP – Never one to let facts get in the way of his plans to grandstand #FactFreeFriday https://t.co/KSMDnzAQzx
— Scott Coriell (@scottcoriell) April 22, 2016
Yesterday, @GovPeterShumlin met w/ Newport Mayor. @RepCP plotted how best to grandstand. You decide what is a better use of time #vtpoli
— Scott Coriell (@scottcoriell) April 22, 2016
The more @RepCP talks, the clearer it becomes that he has no idea what he is talking about #vtpoli
— Scott Coriell (@scottcoriell) April 22, 2016
Pearson said he is “not prepared to answer” whether the Shumlin administration is hiding something. He said the resolution could have been approved in five minutes, and “the defensiveness seems a little out of step for what we’re trying to talk about here.”
