This Newsweek story about Howard Dean and me laughing out loud in my office this morning.
The best line comes near the end where Dean’s legal counsel chief counsel David Rocchio complains that Dean’s opponents are distorting his record as governor of Vermont. So if you’re a politician who is concerned about others distorting what you really did, what is the obvious recourse?
Exactly — hide all the records for a decade so neither reporters nor your political opponents can have access to them!
Then last January, Dean’s chief counsel David Rocchio negotiated a sweeping agreement that resulted in about 140 boxes of Dean records containing several hundred thousand pages of documents being locked up for 10 years at a state archive in Middlesex, said Greg Sanford, the state archivist. The sealed papers include Dean’s correspondence with advisers on, among other matters, Vermont’s “civil unions” law and a state agency that critics charged was used to grant tax credits to Dean’s favored firms.
As with the Bush administration’s penchant for hyper-secrecy — which Dean himself has criticized — hiding the records simply increases the speculation that there’s something there worth hiding.
Source:
WhatÂ’s in Howard DeanÂ’s Secret Vermont Files?. By Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, December 8, 2003.