MPBN: Subpoenas Issued in Maine Document Shredding Scandal

By Patty Wight

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Several officials of the Maine Center for Disease Control are being subpoenaed to appear before the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee, which is trying to get to the bottom of a document shredding scandal. The state workers had been asked to appear before the committee today, but didn’t show. And the state’s handling of the matter, including hiring expensive private attorneys to defend the CDC, is also under scrutiny. Patty Wight reports.

This case dates back to 2012, when the CDC changed its formula for allocating millions of dollars for the Healthy Maine Partnerships program. The redistribution among more than two dozen organizations raised questions, and a CDC employee later alleged she was ordered by superiors to shred documents in anticipation of a Freedom of Access request.

Now, the Government Oversight Committee is trying to figure out what really happened. The panel invited select CDC employees to attend a meeting Friday. “And they didn’t come,” says committee chair, Sen. Emily Cain. 

Can says several employees referenced letters from the Department of Health and Human Services that said employees were welcome to go to the meeting, but not authorized to speak on behalf of the Department or the CDC. A lawyer for CDC Director Dr. Sheila Pinette cited pending litigation as a reason not to attend. 

Republican Rep. Lance Harvell says that left the committee in a quandary. “It’s not just about solving this- it’s a matter of saying, ‘This committee has been defied, in a way, and what precedents does that set?'” Harvell said.

The committee can issue subpoenas, but some, like Republican Sen. David Burns, questioned whether employees would still invoke the Fifth Amendment for fear of losing their jobs.

“These people work for them. They don’t work for us,” Burns said. “Subpoenaing them in here just for the purpose for us to see them seems like a futile effort.”

But the committee didn’t see any other good options and ultimately voted unanimously to subpoena five CDC employees in the hopes they’ll answer some questions.

Another wrinkle in this story is that CDC staffers also face civil litigation by the employee who claims she was ordered to shred documents, Sharon Leahy-Lind. Her lawyer, Cynthia Dill, says she’s seeking permission from the court to add another plaintiff to the case – CDC employee Katie Woodbury.

Dill says her client’s First Amendment rights were violated when she spoke publicly about the environment at the CDC, and also alleges “that she was essentially defamed when the director of the Maine CDC said publicly that individuals who made comments to the newspaper were liars.”

Dill says she is also seeking permission to add two more defendants to the case. It’s the latest development in the case that the Attorney General’s office recently had to recuse itself from, due to what AG Janet Mills calls an “unavoidable conflict.”

“The conflict involved has nothing to do with the OPEGA report. It has nothing to do with any other aspect of the CDC matter you’ve heard in the news,” Mills says.

With the AG’s office out, private attorneys are in – at a cost to the state of about $300 an hour. Mills capped spending for two law firms hired to represent the CDC and its director Dr. Sheila Pinette at $50,000 each. That has state court-appointed lawyers, like Rob Ruffner, fuming.

“The universal reaction amongst the hundreds of attorneys that do this work throughout the state of Maine was not something we could really put on the air, just to be frank about it,” Ruffner says.

That’s because court-appointed attorneys are paid $50 an hour and have begged Appropriations for years for a better rate. Ruffner says he doesn’t begrudge private lawyers getting paid a good fee.

“It’s very ironic, however, that when someone is facing life in prison, which will have not only consequences for that individual, but a lifetime of financial obligations to the state, that the state pays one-sixth that to an attorney to represent that individual,” Ruffner says.

Ruffner points out even the paralegals assigned to the CDC case make $125 an hour – more than twice as much as he does.

Democratic Sen. Dawn Hill, chair of Appropriations, says you can’t compare the state’s allocation for the AG’s office to use private attorneys from time to time with funds for indigent legal services, partially by sheer volume of the number of people who need representation.

“The state can only afford to fund so much, so that, in fact, there are limits on the dollar amount they can get per hour,” she says.

Ruffner says the fees for indigent legal services are not so much for teh benefit of attorneys as they are for the adequate defense of clients, who are also the consituents of lawmakers.