Two Georgia officials — including Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed — have been named finalists for a dubious prize: being the most secretive person or agency in government.
Investigative Reporters and Editors named Reed and Appalachian Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Brenda Weaver among five finalists for the 2017 Golden Padlock Award, given annually by the journalism organization to highlight the most outrageous efforts to put a lid on public information.
Reed earned his nomination for a February document dump in the wake of the Atlanta City Hall bribery scandal. Weaver earned widespread scorn last year for pushing to indict a North Georgia newspaper publisher and his lawyer for seeking public records.
“Undermining the public’s right to know requires dedication, creativity and chutzpah,” Robert Cribb, chairman of the IRE’s Golden Padlock committee, said in a news release. Past winners include the Massachusetts State Police, the public records office for the U.S. Navy, the governors of Oklahoma and Missouri and the U.S. Border Patrol.
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The Reed administration, citing the federal investigation, initially denied requests for records in January, after a contractor was charged with participating in a scheme to pay more than $1 million in bribes for city contracts.
First Amendment experts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time the stonewalling could violate state sunshine laws.
On Feb. 9, the Reed team dumped more than 1.47 million pages of paper records during a contentious press conference in the old City Council chambers. The mountain of documents included unreadable spreadsheets and thousands of blank pages, as well as school lunch menus, crime reports and even street paving schedules.
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The surreal document release and press conference earned notice from Columbia Journalism Review and derision from open government advocates.
In naming Reed as a finalist, IRE pointed to the “remarkable effort and cost invested in creating an illusion of transparency by printing more than a million documents about a city hall bribery scandal in response to a public records request.”
Reed has denied any wrongdoing and pledged his administration’s full cooperation with federal investigators.
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In a 908-word statement, Reed’s office called the nomination “deeply disappointing.”
After a flood of criticism that followed the press conference, the Reed administration created an online portal for the public to access records submitted to federal prosecutors as part of the investigation, which is ongoing.
A spokeswoman for Reed said that commitment to electronic production was made at the Feb. 9 release.
“It is deeply disappointing that Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. would nominate Mayor Kasim Reed as a finalist for their 2017 Golden Padlock Awards considering that over the course of four months, the City of Atlanta has released over two million pages of documents related to a federal investigation and has done so without charging the press or public one penny for the records, despite the significant financial and personnel cost to the City to make these documents available online,” the statement said.
“If the organization’s mission is truly dedicated ‘to improving the quality of investigative reporting,’ then this nomination is not only baffling, but an insult to the hard-working women and men of the Reed Administration who worked expeditiously to produce more than two million pages of documents without compromising an ongoing federal investigation and the privacy of innocent individuals.”
The statement also said it was unfair to compare Reed’s “good faith” effort to provide transparency with other nominees on the list.
To read the full statement, click here.
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Contractors Elvin "E.R." Mitchell Jr. and Charles P. Richards Jr. have each pleaded guilty in the scheme and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors.
“The sophisticated methods of this year’s nominees include ever more proactive techniques including aggressive lobbying for secrecy protections and even retribution against requesters seeking public interest records,” Crib said in the release. “These are some of America’s greatest overachievers in the field of government secrecy, richly deserving of begrudging respect.”
Weaver, the North Georgia judge, scored her nomination for a bizarre saga in which she pushed to indict Fannin Focus publisher Mark Thomason and the newspaper's lawyer, Russell Stookey. The indictment came after Thomason sought records related to Weaver's office's spending. The men were arrested in June 2016 and jailed overnight.
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The strange case started when Thomason tried to determine if a racial slur was used in a court hearing under a different judge. In 2015, Thomason sued to force a court reporter and judges to let him hear an audio recording of the proceedings.
The court reporter then sued Thomason for $1.6 million for defamation for stories he published suggesting transcripts of the case were not accurate. That case was later dropped, but the court reporter also sought legal fees from Thomason.
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Stookey subpoenaed canceled checks from the judge’s office to determine if the court reporter’s legal fees had already been paid. Thomason also made an open records request seeking copies of checks he described as being “illegally cashed.”
In response, Weaver pushed the district attorney to indict the men.
After weeks in the media spotlight, Weaver stepped down from her role as the chair of the state's Judicial Qualifications Commission, the panel that investigates wrongdoing by judges.
An attempt to reach Weaver was not immediately successful.
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The winner of the Golden Padlock award will be announced June 24 at the IRE annual conference in Phoenix.
Other finalists include: the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services for stonewalling efforts to obtain population statistics it used as a revenue stream; Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for wide-ranging efforts to stymie efforts to obtain public records and emails, and for removing information from government websites about environmental issues; and state universities in Pennsylvania that have lobbied to remain inside a “legal black hole” exempting them from open records laws.
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