Minnesota Lawyer Blog

The Star Tribune reports that Attorney General Lori Swanson has fired Amy Lawler, the young assistant AG who has been under suspension since she went public with accusations against her boss of mismanagement, union-busting and ethical improprieties.

The action reportedly came after University of St. Thomas School of Law Dean Thomas Mengler, whom the AG commissioned to look into the ethical allegations, issued a report finding "no evidence of any unethical conduct" by the AG.

Here are two interesting graphs from the Strib story;

Swanson released a statement saying that news coverage of Lawler's allegations earlier this year "ignored the fact that with only 90 days experience in the office, the attorney was in a questionable position to judge the procedures utilized by the office."

Brian Bergson, a spokesman for Swanson, said Lawler was terminated based on the report's findings and because of "other issues" that he did not identify.

If this blog had a "Profiles in Courage" award, I would without hesitation bestow it upon Rep. Steve Simon, DFL- St. Louis Park.

Simon's name has unfairly been dragged through the mud as of late as a direct result of his having the temerity to break ranks with his party and be the lone DFLer on the Legislative Audit Committee to call for a probe into what is going on in the Attorney General's Office. (Click here for details about the fallout from a recent e-mail sent to a number of DFL lawmakers implying that Simon's real motivation for calling for the investigation was a departmental transfer he received while he worked at the AG's Office.)

As has been recorded here in a numerous posts, the AG's Office has been rocked by more than a year of virtually nonstop staffing turmoil, including unusually high turnover and the alleged use of anti-union tactics. Three staff members publicly stepped forward with some of their concerns in a letter earlier this year. One of them has since been indefinitely suspended after making statements on the radio and in the blogosphere calling into question how AG Lori Swanson is running the office. The allegations include assertions of ethical and legal violations. And yet we are supposed to believe that the one DFL lawmaker brave enough to step forward and ask for a probe to look into these matters could only be doing so because he has an ax to grind?

MinnPost's G.R. Anderson, who attended the legislative hearing at which Simon took his bold stand, reported that the DFL lawmaker then explained his decision to call for a probe as follows: "The attorney general is the people's lawyer. I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat. It ought not to matter." Wise words indeed. (And let's not forget that that the auditor's investigation may actually clear Swanson of any legal or ethical violations.)

If, as the e-mail purports, Mike Hatch is in fact the spinmeister impugning Representative Simon's integrity, history provides a simple, yet elegant response to Mr. Hatch's political chicanery: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

I have been following the coverage today on the the Minnesota Attorney General's Office by Minnesota Public Radio and Eric Black at MinnPost. I haven't posted anything primarily because the coverage has been fairly extensive and I don't have much to add at the moment.

It's worth noting that MPR has a posted a PDF of the lengthy letter that assistant AG Amy Lawler sent to Deputy AG Karen Olson after Lawler was placed on administrative leave over remarks she made to the media critical of management of the office. Regardless of your take on the situation, it makes for interesting reading.

UPDATE: The AG is mending some union fences. This in from the local Fox News site:

Beginning April 1, hundreds of Minnesotans will no longer be able to receive care at Park Nicollet. The clinic has chosen not to accept Medicare service plans, including Medicare-supplemental health plans. ...

The Local 49 union has reached out to Attorney General Lori Swanson. Swanson has taken up their case, accusing Park Nicollet of choosing profits over patients. While Park Nicollet has said they’ll continue seeing patients with complicated or compromised medical conditions, they fail to be specific about what that entails, says Swanson.

Click here for more.

After an interesting week at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, I think the parties would best be served by taking a time out, reassessing their positions and trying to find some common ground to work on together.

While you can certainly disagree with the methodology, Attorney General Lori Swanson took an important step in confirming that there are a significant number of staff members with management-related concerns. I think the office should have a chance to work those out internally. It’s in the common interest of both sides to do so rather than letting anyone make political hay out of it.

And so, for the time being, we will return to our regularly scheduled topics, such as the size of Larry Craig’s briefs.

Minnesota Lawyer's website just posted the results of today's "informal survey" of attorneys at the Minnesota Attorney General's Office. (Click here for article).

Staff attorneys were asked whether the writers of a recent letter critical of Lori Swanson spoke for them. The majority of those present and willing to participate said no. (The vote was reportedly 52-30, with 12 declining to participate and 30 out of the office or not otherwise available to vote.)

It's hard for me to say what that vote means because I find the question itself confusing. You could be in favor of a union and not agree with everything that was in that letter. Or you could agree with everything that was in that letter, but not want to give the letter writers the authority to speak for you. It would have been a much simpler and cleaner affair if they had just asked the employees if they wanted to unionize.

An interesting twist on the labor dispute at the Minnesota Attorney General's Office. According to another e-mail to staff posted on this site, Lori Swanson has announced that Miles Lord (former judge, AG, U.S. Attorney) and former Judge Jonathan Lebedoff will conduct an "informal advisory" on the staff's stance on unionization. The unionization issue -- which had been festering since Mike Hatch left the office last May -- recently resurfaced when three assistant AG's publicly identified themselves as supporting a union and called upon Swanson to recognize it.

Lord and Lebedoff -- who combined have practiced law in Minnesota since the days the dinosaurs roamed the Earth -- will apparently function as a two-man Warren Commission, visiting the attorneys in the office today to help Swanson get a "sense of the staff."

I am not sure how I feel about this idea, but I think it's better than Swanson doing the gauging herself as she indicated she intended to do in yesterday's e-mail. At the very least, one has to give Swanson points for innovation for coming up with this.

In an e-mail sent to her entire staff this morning, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson offered a response to a letter sent by three of her assistant AGs late last week calling upon her to recognize a union in the office. (As Minnesota Lawyer reported yesterday, the letter represents the first time current staff members in the AG’s Office have stepped forward and openly advocated for a union.)

Swanson said she was sick with the flu last week when the letter was posted on the Internet, and that she was “disappointed” the employees distributed the letter to the public and the media before she could respond.

“This suggests a communication that is more about a political swipe and less about a good faith attempt to communicate,” Swanson wrote. “It does not further the mission of this office to have political debate with staff members who are supposed to represent this office as professionals.”

(In their letter, the three had disclaimed having any political motivation. “[This effort] is not supported by any outside political interests, nor is it the product of any political vendetta,” they wrote. The three assistant AGs who wrote the letter were all hired during the administrations of AGs from the DFL Party – one under Swanson, one under Mike Hatch and one under Skip Humphrey.)

Swanson said in the e-mail that she “strongly disagrees” with the accusations in the letter, which include assertions that a campaign has been waged in her office to stifle the unionization attempt.

She said she will have two of her deputies meet with the three assistant AGs who wrote the letter to “to flesh out the purpose of the letter and whether the three signatories actually represent the rest of the staff.” She also said she has her own "sense of the staff" and plans to gauge the staff further.

Swanson also noted in the e-mail that Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, yesterday distributed copies of the three staff members’ letter on the floor of the House and called for an investigation of her office.

A copy of the full text of Swanson’s e-mail appears as a comment to another post on this site. We have verified through independent channels that staff members received the posted e-mail.

There was an interesting interview on Minnesota Public Radio this morning with Attorney General Lori Swanson on her first eight months in office. The interview, conducted by Kerri Miller on the Midmorning show, made for very interesting listening. Overall, I thought Miller did a good job in asking some difficult questions about Swanson's stance on the attempted unionization of employees at her office, morale issues at her office and other management troubles that have cropped up in the early part of Swanson's term. Swanson resorted to nonanswers on a number of these inquiries. (One irate caller actually compared her evasive answers on some of these questions to those of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his testimony before Congress.)

On the other hand, I thought Swanson did a very good job discussing some of the priorities of the AG's Office, including going after predatory lenders. And I do have to give her credit for at least putting herself out there to be confronted by some hard questions -- including fielding a phone call from a none-too-pleased AFSCME official.

But why not listen to the entire interview yourself and see what you think? The interview can be accessed on the MPR site by clicking here.

A few weeks ago, I posited in a post ("A double standard?") whether their was any significance to the fact that the general media had intensely scrutinized issues involving Republican U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose's Office, but had virtually ignored issues at DFL Attorney General Lori Swanson's Office. I provocatively threw it out for comment whether their differing political affiliations may have played into the disparate media coverage. That post led to a lot of debate.

I was curious if things had changed at all after it was revealed on April 26 that there were indeed significant management issues at the AG's Office and that the employees there were battling to unionize. So I went through the Star Tribune's archives and pulled up all the articles or blog entries chronicling issues at the two offices from April 27 until today. Here is what I came up with:

Issues at AG’s Office
-- “DFL rift exposed in fight between AG’s Office, Union” (4/27)
-- “Swanson-AFSCME Dispute intensifies” (4/28)
-- “Hatch quits post in AG’s office” (5/2)
-- Nick Coleman: “Mad Mike made for one AG too many” (5/2)

Issues at U.S. Attorney’s Office
-- Nick Coleman: “We need to know the answers about Paulose’s assent” (4/27)
-- “Former U.S. attorney was on early fire list” (4/28)
--- Correction: Letter stating Paulose went to “tier four” law school incorrect; she went to Yale (5/4)
-- “Ellison seeks Justice Department documents on Heffelfinger, Paulose” (5/9)
-- The Big Question Blog: “Assistant U.S. attorneys to Paulose: Quit dissing us and clear our names” (5/9)
-- “Workers who left Paulose’s office protest remarks” (5/10)
-- Editorial: Minnesota still needs answers from Justice (5/11)
-- “Gonzales: Justice Department working with Paulose”* (5/11)
-- “Gonzales Addresses concerns about Paulose”* (5/11)

* Although these last two stories both appear on the Strib’s website, they appear to be different versions of the same story.

The thing that kind of struck me is not so much the difference in the number of mentions between Paulose and Swanson (although it is substantial), but the fact that the Strib coverage of the AG's Office goes completely blank after Hatch announced that he was quitting. I guess Strib readers are not really all that concerned where that leaves things or what is happening with the unionization attempt now that Hatch has left. And this is before the recently announced cuts in the size of their newsroom. What will coverage be like after? Sigh.

The simmering drama at the state attorney general's office reached a climax of sorts yesterday with the abrupt resignation of former attorney general Mike Hatch, but by no means did the saga reach its conclusion. In fact, Hatch's departure probably raised more questions than it answered:

-- Where will Hatch land? Given his reputation as a volatile personality, will a private firm be reluctant to take a chance on him? Or will his obvious legal skills overcome reservations about his demeanor?

-- What will Hatch's role be as the AGO moves forward? His status as a mentor to Lori Swanson is well known. Will he try -- and will he be allowed -- to pull strings behind the scenes?

-- What will change in the AG's office? According to some insiders, Lori Swanson, not Hatch, was the one spending 14-hour days vetting every bit of correspondence that went out of Bremer Tower. Will the new situation allow her to focus on the job she was actually elected to do?

-- With Hatch out and the AGO struggling to replace staff, will recent defectors be welcomed back? Will they want to come back?

-- How will this shake-up affect the office's credibility, if at all? Will the administrative dysfunction that's come to light affect the AGO's ability to effectively pursue important cases?

-- What of the two weeks' notice given by Hatch? Was he strictly following procedure, or will he see this as an opportunity to settle lingering scores before leaving?

-- What's to become of Swanson's political career? A man who nearly became governor was willing to fall on his sword for her. Is that a tribute to how she's being groomed for bigger things?

-- How will the Swanson-AFSCME drama play out? It was the pretext for the public airing of the AGO story to start with, and now it seems to have been placed on the back burner. Will the unionizing efforts in the office pan out, and will Swanson and local AFCSME leader Elliot Seide make peace?

As the AGO story disappears from mainstream news sources, it's easy to see these lingering questions as so much inside-baseball speculation that only law geeks would care about. But in fact, how it plays out from here might be the most important stage in the whole tale.

What do you think will happen?

The Pioneer Press has an excellent story about the situation at the AG's office that even gives our blog a mention. Here is the reference to our blog:

.... Speculation and concern in recent weeks about the escalator out of the attorney general's office led Mark Cohen, editor in chief of the weekly Minnesota Lawyer, to comment on the matter in a blog Saturday. More than 40 commenters rapidly piled on before Cohen ended the string Thursday morning, saying it was becoming unproductive.

Among the comments were several laudatory posts praising Swanson and signed by staff members. One former employee accused Hatch of pressuring staff to post positive comments on the blog, in one case even writing a comment for the staffer.

Hatch denied doing so. "I haven't written any blogs," he said. "In fact, I don't even have an e-mail address." ... (For the full story, see State attorney general's office in shake-up.)

Wow. Those posts coming out of the AG's Office did look orchestrated, but sinking so low as to actually write a comment for a staffer? To pressure others to blog? This from a man who was a few votes shy of being elected the governor of this state?

If any of this is true, I offer my condolences to all the affected individuals . That was not what this blog was supposed to be about, and that type of abuse would be insupportable. I would be happy to offer my cooperation with any sort of investigation. Unbelievable.

In any event, now that the purpose of our blog entry on the AG's Office is out of the bag, I have published below the full story behind our use of this blog to help bring this story to light.

Since our blog is new, I thought I would provide you with a little of the back story on our post asking for comments on the two deputies leaving at Attorney General Lori Swanson's office.

Around the start of April or so, the Minnesota Lawyer staff began hearing ruminations about potential morale issues at both the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Attorney General's Office. We started looking into both of these potential stories, but U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose's three deputies stepped down from their leadership positions before we were able to do anything about those reports -- and a blitz of media coverage on that story ensued.

We heard rumors of a unionization attempt, a large number of departures and personnel-related issues at the AG's Office. However, no one in the office would step forward. The only information we could get on the AG's staff issues was not anything even near being on the record. Minnesota Lawyer staff reporter Dan Heilman spearheaded the investigation, trying to quietly get confirmation of the story and substantiate the facts through various sources. However, he kept running into a wall. Although we knew it would be a tip off to the AG's Office that he was working on something, Dan ultimately decided to make a Data Practices Act request to get information on all the staff departures that had occurred since Swanson became AG. That request is still pending.

Meanwhile, with the launch of our blog, I decided to try to grease the wheels a bit by putting up a post that might encourage some folks to come forward if they had verifiable information about the issues at the AG's Office. For the same reason we could not run the story in Minnesota Lawyer, I did not want to put any of the unverified rumors that we heard into our post. I felt this would be irresponsible reporting. Instead, I devised a post using the one verified fact that we had -- i.e. that Swanson's two deputies had left.

In the post ("A Double Standard?"), I queried why "nary a word" had been said in the general media about Swanson's deputies departing while Paulose was the subject of a barrage of coverage. Adding controversy into the mix, I asked if their differing political persuasions might have had a role in the disparate coverage. (Swanson is a DFLer; Paulose is a Republican.) I figured we would get four or five posts out of it, but that one might be a strong enough lead to verify the story for our newspaper.

But the conservative blogs such as Power Line and Minnesota Democrats Exposed loved the angle of the media pursuing a Republican U.S. attorney over a managerial situation, but not evidencing any interest in a possible managerial situation at the office of an AG who happened to be a DFLer. The conservative blogs gave the post prominent play and out it went all over the blogosphere. Meanwhile, CJ at the Star Tribune became aware of the posting and gave me a call. CJ ran a little item in her column about the post. I mentioned in CJ's column that we wanted comments about the transition at the AG's Office. (Kudos to CJ for being the only person in the general media to pick up on this! A move over to news, perhaps?)

Once it became known through these various sources we were looking for information on our blog, we got a slew of anonymous comments. Several were addressed at me accusing me of having a political agenda (presumably conservative) and of trying to do a hatchet job on Swanson. Then many more anonymous comments repeating some of the rumors that we had already heard about the AG's Office, but giving us no more information than we already had. None of the comments gave us verifiable information.

Suddenly we started getting a bunch of posts from assistant AGs affirming their support of Swanson. It looked like some of these posts were being orchestrated. We wondered why anyone would bother orchestrating a campaign for a simple blog debate. The posts were coming in fast and furious at a rate I never would have anticipated. However, they began getting repetitive and were providing no useful information. Once we passed 40 or so on Thursday morning, we closed the post to further comments.

A few hours later during a routine press conference on another matter, Swanson suddenly found herself fielding unrelated questions from reporters about some of the very concerns that had been raised by posters on this blog. It was then that she confirmed that at least 25 employees had left her office since January. The fact that employees at the AG's Office are trying to unionize also was confirmed. (Follow-up reports are confirming a major morale issue exists in the office.) The Pioneer Press reporter who contacted me was kind enough to let me know that our blog was all the buzz at the press conference.

We are happy for what assistance we offered in bringing this to light so that the situation can be properly addressed. The entire Minnesota Lawyer editorial staff had a hand and input into this unique collaboration between print and electronic journalism, so kudos to Dan, associate editors Barbara Jones and Michelle Lore and Special Sections editor Michael Krieger.

Thanks to all the posters on this blog. We are sorry that we could only give you limited information about why we were seeking your input, but it would not have been responsible journalism for us to have reported unsubstantiated rumors on such important issues.

In any event, we look forward to continuing to serve you with this blog and our regular print publication, Minnesota Lawyer, in the future. We hope you make this -- our new blog -- a regular destination.

From the Associated Press (as reported on the Star Tribune website):

Minnesota's largest state employee union acknowledged Thursday it is attempting to organize lawyers within Attorney General Lori Swanson's office, and the process has apparently turned ugly.

Swanson, a first-term Democrat, accused leaders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 5 of threatening to launch a campaign to "demean or disparage" the office if she didn't allow them to proceed.

Click here for more.

Hmm. I guess this confirms some of the ruminations we have heard coming out of that office. One of our reporters, Dan Heilman, had been looking into the departure issue since early April and recently has been waiting for an answer on a Data Practices Act request to give us a list of the departed attorneys and staff.

We in the media love a local angle to a story, which is one reason there have been so many attempts to tie the recent upheaval in the local U.S. Attorney's Office with the national scandal over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. It's tough to sit on the sidelines with such a juicy story brewing nationally. So when U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose's three deputies stepped down earlier this month, it gave the local media a chance to participate in the fun and games if only we could connect those darn dots.

The problem was that it required fitting a square peg into a round hole. As I pointed out in my last column "A management primer: Who moved the U.S. attorney's cheese?" the deputy dispute was exactly what it appeared to be, a managerial issue between a young new manager who wanted to change the status quo and strong-willed and experienced deputies with ideas of their own about how the office should be run.

Nonetheless, the attempts continue to tie Paulose's office with the national scandal. The Star Tribune reports today on a case involving a probe last summer by the Minnesota Attorney General's Office into alleged overbilling by an autism center chaired by Ron Carey, who is now chairman of the state Republican Party. In the middle of running for governor at the time, then-Attorney General Mike Hatch, a DFLer, referred the case to the U.S. Attorney's Office to avoid the appearance that any subsequent prosecution was politically motivated. The case is still pending at the U.S. Attorney's Office. (The Strib story published today is "Politics colored probe of autism center billing.")

So was this the ever elusive "missing link?" If Paulose's office has failed to prosecute a case involving a prominent Republican, doesn't that show she is tied in to the firings scandal and related attempts to politicize the office of U.S. attorney? Errr .... sorry. This one was an air ball. It turns out that Paulose prudently recused herself from the case.

But rather than just giving up he ghost at this point, the story then switches gears and goes after the assistant U.S. attorney who was assigned the case. The article maintains he had a conflict of interest because he applied for a judgeship from (Republican) Gov. Tim Pawlenty while the case was pending. Seems like a stretch to me to find a conflict here -- particularly given that Pawlenty had no idea that the assistant USA was handling the case and in any case wound up awarding the coveted judgeship to someone else -- but I suppose the Strib reporters didn't want to just write off all that time they had spent trying to connect Paulose to the national U.S. attorneys' scandal.

Meanwhile, speaking of the AG's Office, no one seems to have picked up on an ironic little fact reported Minnesota Lawyer's Bar Buzz column recently. Right about the time Paulose's three deputies stepped down, two of newly installed state Attorney General Lori Swanson's deputies departed from her office with nary a peep in the press. (See "Two deputies exit AG’s office," in the April 9 Minnesota Lawyer, password required.)

Swanson, a relatively youthful 40 and the first woman to hold the AG job in the state, is a DFLer. Paulose, a relatively youthful 34 and the first woman to hold the U.S. attorney job in the state, is a Republican. Hmm. We will leave it to you and the political blogs to speculate if there is any significance to the disparate coverage.