When House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, stood in a packed hallway in the Statehouse in early May to announce the launch of impeachment proceedings against two of Franklin County’s top elected officials, she pledged the House would conduct the process in a transparent manner.
“All of the testimony will take place in open session, all public? There won’t be executive sessions?” asked a Vermont Public reporter.
“I believe so,” Krowinski replied at the time, noting that she would need to confirm details about the process with the House clerk.
“But it will be an open and transparent process,” she concluded.
In the roughly six weeks that have since lapsed, the House’s seven-member Special Committee on Impeachment Inquiry has met five times, and several of those hearings have been conducted in closed-door executive sessions for hours at a time, prompting an outcry from several of Vermont’s media organizations.
Lawmakers are still in the early, investigatory stages of an impeachment inquiry into Franklin County Sheriff John Grismore and State’s Attorney John Lavoie.
Calls for Grismore’s removal from office have mounted for months, since video evidence surfaced that showed him kicking a shackled man in the groin. Grismore, who was elected to his seat after the video was made public, has resisted calls to step down voluntarily.
Lavoie, too, has refused to vacate his seat. In a sudden flurry of activity last month, Vermont’s Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs made the extraordinary move to launch a public pressure campaign to push the county prosecutor out of office, after an independent investigation concluded that he had been repeatedly harassing and discriminating against his employees. Lavoie’s alleged workplace behavior ranged from the verbal — referring to employees as “slut” or “whore,” for example — to the physical — such as unwanted touching and imitating people with disabilities.
Two days after the department went public with its concerns about Lavoie, the House announced it would pursue impeachment of both Lavoie and Grismore.
Thus far, much of the special committee’s early work has been to conduct its own, independent investigation of the allegations against Lavoie. Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans — who is serving as the committee’s vice chair — told VTDigger this week that lawmakers “have to be able to do the investigation phase with much of the witness testimony being confidential.”
“We don’t take the use of executive session lightly,” McCarthy said. “But when you’re interviewing vulnerable people who could very easily be exposed to retaliation or humiliation, frankly, you have to be able to do that in a setting where they feel free to give you all the details so that you can even find out what the facts and the truth are in the first place.”
The investigation’s secrecy has prompted several of Vermont’s journalism organizations — including the Vermont Press Association, Vermont Association of Broadcasters and news station WCAX — to pen letters to the committee, imploring it to conduct its work before the public. In their own memo issued on May 26, McCarthy and Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, who chairs the special committee, responded to some of the journalists’ complaints.
Jay Barton, WCAX vice president and general manager, penned one of the letters, and on Wednesday he told VTDigger that the impeachment inquiry “is a proceeding surrounding public officials who have been elected by the people to these roles.”
“Throughout all of American jurisprudence, especially with respect to privacy law, the act of holding oneself up for election to a public office of any kind removes significant privacy — what people might call rights to privacy — surrounding the conduct of the job,” Barton said.
As for the safety and well-being of any victims, Barton said he understands lawmakers’ concerns and thinks the committee members “are trying to do what they view to be the right thing.” He added that news organizations have to make complicated ethical reporting decisions on a daily basis.
The difference now, Barton said, is that Vermont’s news organizations aren’t even being given the chance to make those calls. Lawmakers already made them.
“I don’t want there to be victims in the first place, much less victims who might be hurt again by reporting,” Barton said. “Perhaps there’s some way in which they could have some privacy provisions around certain witnesses. But in this case, the doors are shut completely, and so we will not have the chance to weigh any of those things at all until well after it’s too late.”
Asked whether witnesses are being asked on a case-by-case basis if they would prefer to be interrogated openly or in executive session, McCarthy said, “During the investigation, we will be taking virtually all of the witness testimony in executive session.” Asked whether that was a committee decision, McCarthy said, “Yes.”
“No one is unhappy with the opportunity to testify in executive session,” McCarthy said of witnesses who have been called. “I would say that we are getting much more candid testimony than witnesses would be willing to give if their statements were going to be on the news that night.”
The committee’s list of witnesses has not been made public.
In a May 30 letter to the special committee on behalf of the Vermont Press Association, Matthew Byrne, an attorney with the Burlington-based law firm Gravel & Shea, decried members’ “possible sweeping secrecy” in the investigation process, arguing that, “Most of your adopted rules would never pass muster in Vermont courts.”
“Witnesses, even child victims in sex crimes, testify in open court,” Byrne wrote.
McCarthy told VTDigger that to compare the committee’s investigation to courtroom proceedings is a false equivalency.
“It is much more equivalent to the investigation that prosecutors do, or a grand jury does, in trying to determine whether charges should be brought,” McCarthy said. “And those kinds of processes have to happen largely behind closed doors, because if no charges are ever brought, if we never bring the articles of impeachment, it would be terrible for the sensitive witnesses and the respondents — the state’s attorney and the sheriff who are being investigated — if we aired a whole lot of allegations and claims that were later found to not be credible.”
When the committee concludes its investigation, it will make the determination of whether to bring forward articles of impeachment. The committee will also decide whether to issue a report on its investigation, and it has sole discretion over what testimony — if any — to include in that report. If the full House were to vote to adopt articles of impeachment, the Senate would then conduct a trial, during which some of the testimony may become public, McCarthy said.
What if the committee decides not to proceed with impeachment, though? Will any of the committee’s investigation see the light of day?
“I don’t know the answer to that question,” McCarthy said Tuesday.
The committee is scheduled to meet again on Friday, June 16, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. According to its brief public agenda, it will hear witness testimony on the “matter of State’s Attorney John Lavoie.”
“This hearing is expected to be conducted in executive session,” the agenda says.
