By Ralph Ciprianofor BigTrial.net
What do you do when you screw up royally?
If you're the state Attorney General's office, you try to keep a top secret lid on everything, even if its years after they put Jerry Sandusky in jail.
That's what our A.G.'s office is up to. On June 28th, Jennifer C. Selber, executive deputy attorney general, wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney D. Brian Simpson in Harrisburg, about all of the files the A.G. turned over to the feds three years ago from the state's grand jury investigation of Sandusky.
Selber's concern was that the U.S. Attorney's office not turn any of the A.G.'s records in response to a long-running FOI battle being waged by Ryan Bagwell, a former newspaper reporter and candidate for Penn State trustee. When Bagwell couldn't get any records out of the state, he filed FOI requests with the U.S. Attorney's office in 2014, and so far has recouped some 1,000 pages of documents.
The A.G.'s office wants to make sure no further documents are released.
"Initially, it must be understood that the investigation of Sandusky PSU and TSM [The Second Mile] was done through two Statewide Investigating Grand Juries," Selber wrote. "As such, all of the materials gathered by the OAG and provided to your Office were subject to grand jury secrecy."
The state attorney general turned over their Sandusky records when they asked the U.S. Attorney's office to investigate Penn State and The Second Mile, Sandusky's defunct charity, for "financial irregularities and possible Clery Act violations" stemming from the state's grand jury probe of Sandusky. The Clery Act mandates transparency when it comes to reporting crime on campus.
The feds closed the investigation in 2014, without any tangible results.
Under Pennsylvania law, the state is allowed to turn over records from an investigation "only if the agency is investigating a crime within its jurisdiction and the person to whom disclosure is made are sworn to grand jury secrecy," Selber wrote. She asked that the records turned over to the feds under an FOI request remain secret and "confidentiality be maintained."
Bagwell says he's determined to see this battle through to the end, "no matter how long it takes."
"There's virtually no public access to records from police investigations in Pennsylvania," Bagel said. "They're not used to the idea of having their investigations scrutinized."
Bagel says if the records are eventually released, they "might reveal some interesting things that suggest the original grand jury presentment should have never been written in the way it was."
As previously reported on this blog, the grand jury report on Sandusky was built around an event that didn't happen, an anal rape of a naked 10-year-old boy by Sandusky, supposedly witnessed by Mike McQueary in the Penn State showers back in 2001.
However, four men who interviewed McQueary said he didn't witness a sexual attack. Even McQueary agrees he never saw an anal rape, as he stated in writing in an email to the state attorney general's office.
A federal official, former Special Agent John Snedden, also investigated the alleged shower rape as part of an investigation of former Penn State President Graham Spanier. Snedden concluded in a recently declassified 110-page report done in 2012 that McQueary was not a credible witness, no sex crime was committed at Penn State, and hence, no cover up, since there was nothing to cover up.
During the state attorney general's investigation, a couple of state troopers were caught on a tape recorder lying to an alleged victim of sex abuse about hearing the same story from several other alleged victims, even though it wasn't true.
"Obviously the AG is doing everything it can to make sure that people don't have the opportunity to review the facts versus the presentment," Snedden said.