The Vermont House committee tasked this year with investigating whether to impeach two Franklin County officials — one of whom has since resigned — continues to keep much of its business closed to the public as it enters a new stage of its work.
On Thursday morning, committee members opened an executive session to take testimony regarding John Grismore, the embattled county sheriff. The hearing, which started around 9 a.m., is the first time members have devoted a full day to testimony on the sheriff’s case, said Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans, the committee’s vice chair.
Grismore, who repeatedly kicked a shackled man in police custody last summer and faces allegations of financial misconduct, is now the committee’s sole focus after John Lavoie, then the Franklin County state’s attorney, stepped down in late August.
Up to that point, the committee’s work had focused largely on Lavoie’s conduct — and nearly all of the testimony it took about him was in sessions closed to the public.
As of Thursday, the committee has held 17 meetings, 14 of which have been conducted, at least in part, in executive session, according to the panel’s website. At least six meetings have been held entirely behind closed doors, the online committee records show.
The committee’s rules give members broad authority to enter into executive sessions to protect witnesses, consult with attorneys and review confidential documents, but also “as otherwise necessary to enable the Special Committee to conduct its inquiries.”
Members’ ongoing use of executive sessions this year drew fresh criticism from leaders of news organizations in Vermont, some of whom made similar complaints earlier this year when the committee was working to finalize its rules and procedures.
The Vermont Press Association “remains concerned that the people’s work is still being done behind closed doors when there is no justification for it,” Lisa Loomis, the organization’s president and the editor of The Valley Reporter, said in an email.
The press association penned a letter to the committee earlier this year, imploring it to conduct its work before the public, as did the Vermont Association of Broadcasters and the TV news station WCAX.
“I continue to maintain that executive session flies in the face of the intent of open democratic governance,” Jay Barton, WCAX’s vice president and general manager, said on Wednesday. Barton noted that the committee is following its policies, and he “would like to assume that they are operating with the citizens’ best interests at heart.”
“And I am almost certain that they are,” Barton continued. “But my problem is, I can’t be certain because I don’t know what they’re doing.”
The committee has shared scant details on who it has taken testimony from this year. It has not published a witness list.
In an interview on Wednesday evening, McCarthy said members plan to hear during Thursday’s hearing from current and former employees of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, as well as experts on police officers’ use of force. He declined to provide more specifics.
Committee members are also still awaiting the results of an investigation by Downs Rachlin Martin, the law firm it hired to to look into Grismore and his conduct at the office. McCarthy said he expects the firm will file a final report within the next two weeks.
He said the Burlington-based firm did not have to take legal action to enforce a subpoena for records from the sheriff’s office, as it had threatened over the summer.
McCarthy said he and his colleagues continue to view executive sessions as the only way to provide discretion to the people coming in to testify about powerful local leaders, and who may be worried about facing blowback or retaliation from doing so.
“We’re trying to establish the most candid and honest picture of what happened, and what is happening, in the office,” McCarthy said, speaking about the county sheriff’s department. “And especially when we’re interviewing people who are still working for or with the office, it’s really important that we do that in executive session.”
Asked how he could reassure the public that the committee was doing its due diligence, McCarthy urged a reporter to look at how much time members have spent on the process so far — some five months — contending it shows they’re acting deliberately.
“We’re not trying to rush forward,” he said. He noted that the committee also wants to wait for other investigations of Grismore — such as the Vermont Criminal Justice Council’s inquiry into whether to revoke the sheriff’s law enforcement certification — to be completed before it ends its work. That inquiry has been postponed multiple times.
There are three main lines of inquiry the committee is looking into, McCarthy said. One is getting a deeper understanding of how the fallout from Grismore’s kicks last August have impacted the operations of his office. The second is following an ongoing Vermont State Police investigation into allegations of financial wrongdoing at the office. And the third, McCarthy said, is determining whether the sheriff has been meeting his contractual obligations in the Franklin County communities his department serves.
That’s far different from the investigation into Lavoie, who was accused of harassing and discriminating against his employees. Lavoie’s workplace behavior allegedly ranged from verbal — referring to employees as “slut” or “whore,” for example — to physical — such as unwanted touching and imitating people with disabilities.
The impeachment committee’s final report on Lavoie, which it released in the wake of his decision to resign, did not say whether lawmakers substantiated any of those allegations, which had been outlined in a separate, independent investigation.
To Paul Heintz, VTDigger’s editor-in-chief, there is nothing about Grismore’s case — at least, from what the committee and other investigators have stated publicly — that rises to a level requiring lawmakers’ work and deliberations to be conducted privately.
“The incident at the center of the Grismore investigation is well known to Vermonters. It’s well chronicled by the media. It’s on tape. So what exactly is the committee worried about us learning?” Heintz said on Wednesday. “Secrecy for the sake of secrecy does not justify closing the doors on the people and the press.”
Heintz noted that committee members have repeatedly said that more information about their work would be made public if they decided to recommend impeachment — which could set the stage for a criminal trial adjudicated by the Vermont Senate.
However, “if that’s the case, then wouldn’t the prospect of that information ultimately being released to the public be just as chilling as if it were released to the public now?” Heintz continued. “We find ourselves on a slippery slope.”
Editor’s note: VTDigger editor-in-chief Paul Heintz was not involved in the editing or publication of this story.
