Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled Friday that the University of Virginia cannot be compelled to provide information in investigations under the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act because the university and other state agencies are not considered “persons” under the act.
The ruling ended Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s high-profile attempt to force UVA to release thousands of emails sent to and from climatologist Michael Mann while he was on the UVA faculty and created the since-debunked “hockey stick” graph, which purported to prove that the Earth is warming at an alarming rate. Mann had received five grants – four federal and one from the state – to do his research.
Cuccinelli’s office pointed out that the ruling “explicitly recognized that in some instances in the act, the term ‘person’ will always [be] construed to include Commonwealth agencies’ such as the University of Virginia, while in other instances, it will not.”
Such ridiculous legal ambiguity suggests that behind-the-scenes politics to prevent UVA’s embarrassment may have been in play.
“From the beginning, we have said that we were simply trying to review documents that are unquestionably state property to determine whether or not fraud had been committed. Today, the court effectively held that state agencies do not have to provide state-owned property to state investigators looking into potential fraud involving government funds,” Cuccinelli said in a statement, adding that he will drop his two Civil Investigative Demands (similar to subpoenas) against UVA.
In the end, it might not matter, as another global warming scandal involving the chairman of the science integrity task force of the American Geophysical Union has brought more discredit to Mann’s dwindling movement.
Peter Gleick publicly confessed that he impersonated a board member of The Heartland Institute so that he could fraudulently obtain and forward confidential documents questioning the climate theories of Mann and other global warming alarmists to advocates and journalists, which they could in turn use as fodder for stories and blogs castigating the “skeptics” as tools of the oil industry.
But the purloined documents actually proved otherwise, showing how Heartland exposed “Climategate” on a shoestring budget with minimal commercial funding.
Gleick recently announced he is taking a “temporary, short-term leave of absence” as president of the Pacific Institute.
