Once again, Roy Cooper is demonstrating a lack of leadership. No, this time it’s not the problems at the SBI crime lab. And no, this time it’s not Roy Cooper’s changing legal opinions as to who can access state employee’s retirement records. This time, the state’s top lawyer is idly sitting by while Raleigh bureaucrats disregard laws designed to ensure openness within and access to our government.
Apparently, Roy Cooper does not see the importance of preserving the public’s right to know about the workings of their government. When asked about whether such policies violate the state’s open records law, Roy Cooper said it would inappropriate for the attorney general to respond.
Really? When Raleigh bureaucrats cannot follow their own laws to provide openness and transparency in their actions, where is Roy Cooper? Maybe his legal memo to state officials outlining our public record laws was simply chunked or maybe this is just another example of Roy Cooper’s failed leadership.
Bob Crumley believes these records belong not just to the Raleigh bureaucrats, but rather belong to North Carolinians in order to guarantee openness and honesty within our government. As Attorney General, Bob Crumley will not pass the buck while public records are illegally destroyed, deleted, lost or chunked.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Note to Roy Cooper: Letters, Notes E-Mails and Other Documents are Public Records
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1 comments:
Again. As much as many of us applaud Bob Crumley giving Consumer Advocate and sometime attorney general Roy Cooper a much-deserved hard time for his press-release opinions about public record laws applying to nearly all state employees aside from Governor Easley and his cronies, Cooper has been MIA so very often from most of the most important prosecutions of criminal behavior by those who have a sworn duty of the public trust some of us have become used to begin sentences with, "if North Carolina had an attorney general...etc."
People may like Roy Cooper, but that needs to be challenged with, "but he's been a lousy attorney general..."
Where has he been while Meg Scott Phipps, Jim Black, and all the other corrupt among Roy's "clearly out of bounds" defendants, are being brought to justice by the federal Justice Department?
Why is it he hasn't challenged the District Court case assigned to that Headcase grandstanding Craig Brown?
The US JD has been after the video poker mafia, and as a sideline, picked up cases they couldn't ignore, like Phipps, Decker & Black. Roy and his attorneys and the local DA's under his flag haven't picked up the slack, and give us no confidence that he isn't anything other than a scared rabbit when it comes to uprooting the corrupt pay-to-play elite throughout the state.
Some of the nice-guy "don't scare the horses or the women" PR Bob has used has to be punctuated with more direct attacks on Cooper for questions about his job performance that he can't answer.
Otherwise, the simmering desire for justice out here will conclude Bob is just as frightened as Cooper is of the racketeers and "Gang in Suits" who "know people" who will burn the occassional restaurant down of murder the essential witness.
Time for a briefing, Bob, from those who run The Carolina Journal. This is good, but much more is needed, because you won't be able to out-friendly Cooper.
(He's not Andy Taylor, he's Floyd the Barber.)
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