( March 2, 2012) – In response to actions taken by Virginia’s Attorney General, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled today that the University of Virginia and all other state agencies cannot be served with civil investigative demands which compel agencies to provide information for fraud investigations involving government funds.
In response, American Tradition Institute’s Christopher Horner (Director of Litigation) stated:
“It has been our opinion from the outset of our pursuit of these public records that, by getting the University to admit it possessed records it was telling the public were destroyed, the Attorney General had already won.
There is no argument that these are not state property, or that the FOI law doesn’t expressly cover them; as acknowledged in UVa’s faculty handbook, its website, agreements faculty must sign, and elsewhere.
And so we look forward to their release under the Freedom of Information Act.”
For requests to interview Mr. Horner, contact Tom Tanton, ATI’s Executive Director at info@atinstitute.org or (916)645-2854.
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Looks like FOIA requests and subsequent litigation or a change in the federal Administration will be necessary before this information is regarded seriously.
KV;
In case you haven’t figgered it out yet, you left out the “of” when you typed the URL. A good e.g. of why copy-paste is better!!
kangaroocourtOFaustralia
LazyTeenager says:
March 3, 2012 at 5:14 pm
If this whole thing turns out to be a whopping failure, millions of Joe public’s dollars just got flushed down the toilet by Cucinnelli. If that happens is Cuccinelli going to do jail time for abuse of power?
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the billions spent on CAGW are a complete waste of tax payer funds…
the VA Supreme court lays the ground work where UVA is a government agency. therefore all of their work product, emails, and paperwork are thus GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. this makes them subject to the Public Records Act and FOIA demands/requests by the PUBLIC..
The Attorney General has duties to oversee and investigate fraud allegations. Now that the Court has deemed them part of the state government they must produce, on demand, all relevant records to him… on demand- not a FOIA… and the Governor can place an executive order forcing them to disclose. The Public can use FOIA but the AG only needs to ask… the court made this incredibly simple for him…
The waste is some here are to lazy to look for themselves in both policy and science matters, they parrot what they are told to say.. The shear fact that billions have already been wasted on the lie what a few dollars to expose the bastards?
by the way (lazyboy) Mann’s work had been proven fraud many times….
now its time to hold him accountable….
Some thoughts on the email as a SysAdmin. As long as they are on a tape (or other backup) then they are available. If the emails were ‘given’ to someone else, the local copy would be retained until such time as it was ordered deleted by a local MailAdmin. It would remain then on tape for as long as the backup tape is retained.
As a person knowledgeable on the opinions of Jefferson (and Madison) they both would be aghast at the UVa (Jefferson’s “child” as he was a strong reason it was founded) acting in a way that violates public trust. Especially since Jefferson (and Madison) had very high skepticism of the Gov’t ablity to be trusted. (see US Constitution for Madison’s oppinion.)
Either they are a government institution and the documents are available under FOIA or they are a private institution that receives government funds and the documents are available via Cucinelli’s request.
Either way, these documents must be produced. Now that a judge has ruled about which statute is applicable, what’s the holdup?