Bregman Subpoenas Susana

As he threatened to do two weeks ago, an Albuquerque lawyer has subpoenaed Gov. Susana Martinez in the wrongful termination case of the former boyfriend of Martinez's former secretary of the Corrections Department.

The subpoena, issued Friday, July 27 by administrative law Judge Leonard Padilla, commands Martinez to appear at the law office of Sam Bregman at 11 a.m. Sept. 10.

Bregman represents Larry Flynn, a state probation and parole supervisor who was fired in December, about three months after an incident in which he allegedly fired a gun outside of the home on state penitentiary grounds that he shared with then-Corrections Secretary Lupe Martinez — no relation to the governor.

Flynn  told state police investigators that he was shooting at rattlesnakes. Flynn also had been investigated on allegations that he's padded his time card.

Flynn was improperly fired, Bregman argues, because the Governor’s Office improperly got involved in a personnel action against a classified state employee.

A spokesman for the governor said Tuesday that Gov. Martinez had not yet been served with the subpoena to testify, but had received a previous subpoena from Bregman to produce documents, including emails related to Flynn.

Asked whether Gov. Martinez would fight the subpoena to testify — and if so, if she'd invoke executive privilege  — spokesman Scott Darnell said in an email, "We will examine that issue if/when it arises. Again, as we’ve said, this is an attorney’s latest ploy to focus on anything but Mr. Flynn’s own conduct as a state employee, which led to Secretary Marcantel’s disciplinary decision."

Gregg Marcantel was appointed to the job of Corrections secretary last year after Lupe Martinez left. Marcantel fired Flynn.

Bregman is an Albuquerque-based Democratic Party activist who has been mentioned as a possible gubernatorial candidate. He has declined to comment on his possible candidacy.

Also issued subpoenas Friday were Martinez's chief of staff Keith Gardner, deputy chief of staff Ryan Cangiolosi and State Police Chief Robert Shilling.

Judge Padilla ruled last month that Gardner, will have to answer questions about Flynn’s firing. The Governor’s Office had tried to quash that subpoena, claiming executive privilege. However, Padilla said Gardner wasn't protected by executive privilege.

Bregman postponed Gardner's deposition after he obtained an email sent to Martinez regarding Flynn.

The email in question is from Cangiolosi, sent from his Yahoo account to Martinez, at her susana2010.com address and copied to Gardner at his Gmail account. The email is dated Sept. 5 — two days after Lupe Martinez abruptly resigned from her $106,000-a-year job and less than two months before Flynn was charged by state police with two misdemeanors related to the shooting incident. Both charges later were dropped.

“Governor, Please see the attached document brief on Larry Flynn,” Cangiolosi wrote. Attached was a memo from Rosa Manning of the State Police Criminal Investigations Division to Chief Shilling, stating, “Per your request, investigative research was conducted on Larry E. Flynn ...” The report lists other personal information on Flynn, including court cases involving Flynn, vehicle registrations and links to news stories about him on the Internet.

Martinez has vehemently denied she ever received  Cangiolosi's email. She and others in the administration have said all of Martinez's 2010 campaign emails accounts have been defunct since the middle of last year.

Gov Martinez Subpoena

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP: The Myth of the Voting Dead

Yikes! I realized that I'm late in posting my last Sunday column -- I usually do that on Monday morning -- but I just realized that somehow my column from the previous Sunday never got posted either. I don't think it's obsolete yet, so here it is, better late than never.


A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
 July 17, 2012

Secretary of State Dianna Duran is once again looking for noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. Her office, as I reported last week, is requesting access to a Homeland Security database. But if this effort goes like the extensive search for illegal immigrants that Duran conducted last year, she’ll be six times more likely to find a dead person registered to vote than a live noncitizen.

Duran’s study last year found 641 dead people on the state’s voter rolls. Also uncovered were 104 noncitizens who registered to vote in New Mexico, though only 19 of those actually cast ballots in elections. (The Secretary of State’s Office didn’t know whether any of the dead voters had ballots cast for them.)

Jokes about the voting dead — or should we call them “The Silent Majority”? — have long been part of New Mexico’s political culture. It looks like the current County Clerk of Santa Fe County and her likely successor are tired of the joke.

Geraldine Salazar, running unopposed to be the next county clerk, last week sent out a lengthy statement on behalf of her boss, County Clerk Valerie Espinoza, trying to alleviate fears of deceased people clogging the ballot boxes.

Salazar said in every election, invariably some voter “will be signing the signature roster and say, ‘What is Aunt Tilly’s name doing in the roster? She died two years ago. Can she still vote?’ ” Espinoza, Salazar said, “wants to assure citizens that the deceased do not vote in the county.”

Salazar noted that during Espinoza’s two terms, “there has been only one documented occurrence where a voter tried (and failed) to get an absentee ballot for a deceased brother. The system and astute city and county staff members prevented voter fraud.”

But, Salazar said, this “still begs the question why do the deceased and ex-residents remain registered voters in Santa Fe County? The reason is that state law is scrupulous in protecting citizens’ right to vote.” It’s not enough for a relative or a friend to call up and say that a loved one has died or moved out of state, she said.

“Think of the mischief that could happen if staff members accepted anyone’s calling — sight unseen — to say that Aunt Tilly had died or John Doe had moved and should be taken off the voter list. Using robocalls, political parties and operatives could disenfranchise thousands of voters. To counteract fraud, state law insists on documentary evidence.”

One such documentation is a newspaper obituary. Salazar said County Clerk’s Office staff reads the local papers’ obit pages every day looking for voters who have shuffled off their mortal coil. “Staff members check birth dates, residency and then research them in the state’s electronic voter file,” she said. “If there is a match, the person’s electronic record is marked `deceased’ to deactivate it, and the record is removed from the system.”

I’m just nit-picking here, but obits aren’t always reliable. Back when I was a police reporter, I wrote extensively about the case of an Oklahoma woman’s skeleton found buried under a rosebush on Santa Fe’s east side. The suspect, the woman’s son, said that couldn’t be possible. His mother had died in Maryland, and there was an obituary in her hometown paper to prove it.

However, Maryland officials testified that there was no death certificate for the woman in that state. And I talked to folks at the Oklahoma newspaper that ran the obituary, and they admitted that they don’t normally verify obits that come in. (The suspect in the case was found not guilty of murder.)

OK, I’ll admit that’s an extreme example (and has nothing to do with voting. I don’t think the poor victim ever cast a ballot after she was buried under that rosebush.) The point is, while most obituary information comes straight from the funeral home, there can be exceptions.

If there’s not a published obituary, Salazar said, the county clerk wouldn’t know to remove the name unless the family brings in a death certificate.

This is all well and good, but as Viki Harrison of New Mexico Common Cause recently pointed out, only about half the registered voters bother to show up and vote. If the living aren’t interested, maybe we should open it up to the dead.

Contact Steve Terrell at sterrell@sfnewmexican.com. Read his political blog at roundhouseroundup.com.

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP: Tom Udall and his Pet Issues

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
July 17, 2012


For a senator who isn’t up for re-election this year, New Mexico’s Tom Udall sure seems to be at the forefront of a lot of interesting national issues.

Udall’s pet causes, for the most part, are not the ones driving the national political conversation. But no matter what position you take on the issues — or what you think of the senator himself — it’s interesting to watch how Udall is building a national profile by taking strong positions in the face of strong opposition.

Just last week Democrat Udall, along with New Mexico’s retiring senior senator, Jeff Bingaman, and a handful of other senators from both political parties, sent a letter to James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, requesting information about Americans’ communications that have been secretly collected by the federal government under a 4-year-old surveillance law.

“We are alarmed that the intelligence community has stated that ‘it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located inside the United States whose communications may have been reviewed’ under the FISA Amendments Act,” the letter said. FISA is short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Udall has a long history of being concerned with government intrusion on people’s privacy. In 2001, back in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Udall was one of just 66 House members who voted against the U.S. Patriot Act.

Earlier in the week, Udall testified before a Senate subcommittee on a constitutional amendment he’s introduced that would nullify the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision by giving Congress and state legislatures the right to impose campaign spending limits.

“Support is building for my constitutional amendment,” he told radio reporters in a conference call Tuesday. “Over 1.7 million citizens have signed petitions in support of an amendment. Over 275 local resolutions have passed calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. And legislatures in six states, including New Mexico, have called on Congress to send an amendment to the states for ratification.”

Udall can’t claim bipartisan support on this one, though. According to national news reports, no Republican senators even attended the hearing. And Udall conceded at the hearing that “an amendment can only succeed if Republicans join us in this effort.”

Good luck.

Earlier in July, Udall was in the news for chairing a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on proposed legislation to ban race-day medication in horse racing. He and U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., are the sponsors of a bill called the Interstate Horse Racing Improvement Act.

“Across the United States, and sadly in New Mexico, the sport of horse racing has reached a terrible level of corruption and exploitation,” Udall said before the hearing. “Horses are being drugged to run through injuries. When they break down, jockeys are seriously injured, sometimes fatally, and the horses are euthanized. And all of this for profit.”

One of Udall’s pet issues, ending the U.S. Senate filibuster, was thought to be dead after the Senate in 2010 voted down a resolution Udall co-sponsored that would have allowed the Senate to halt debate on a bill by a simple majority vote. However, this month Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — who opposed Udall’s bill in 2010 — said he now would push such a change if Democrats retain control of the Senate.

If that happens, Udall undoubtedly will be out front on this issue again.

Who Won the Redistricting Wars?

The lawyers, of course.

Retired state District Judge Jim Hall, who presided over the redistricting trials earlier this year has decided which lawyers get paid how much by the state for their work in redistricting.

In short, taxpayers are out more than $2.9 million.

Here's how the money is being divided:

Sena plaintiffs (Republican legislators) $172,730.54
Multi-tribal plaintiffs (Native American tribes) $685,346.63
James Plaintiffs (Republican legislators) $524,427.87
Maestas plaintiffs (Democratic legislators) $829,441.16
Egolf plaintiffs (Democratic legislators) $756,681.82
League of United Latin American Citizens $20,222.50

Barry Massey of the Associated Press has a story about this HERE.

Below is Hall's 24-page decision


Decision on Attorney's Fees

Is #FF a Clue to Mitt's Running Mate?

Beth Meyers, who is in charge of Mitt Romney's vice president search, caused some twitter on Twitter  after she Tweeted these "Follow Friday" messages earlier today.

Our governor's Twitter handle is up there along with others mentioned as possible Republican veep nominees.

But I wouldn't get all that excited about this.

I spoke with @Gov_Martinez earlier this week and asked her whether she'd changed her mind about wanting to be Romney's running mate. As I expected, he said she had not and added, "They haven't even called.

Out on a Pledge

Here's a modest proposal: Instead of voting on candidates, from now on we just vote on the pledges that various interest groups currently have candidates sign.

In today's New Mexican, I took a look at single-interest pledges signed by New Mexico's two major-party U.S. Senate candidates have signed.

In the piece I quote David Walker, a co-founder  of the moderate political group No Labels. Walker is a former U.S. Comptroller who served under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

“What that basically means is that Congress has signed away its ability to ever seriously address our country’s fiscal problems,” Walker said in a statement issued by No Labels. “They are elected to solve problems, not to stonewall solutions.”

I also quote an editorial that ran last year in USA Today under the headline “Candidates who sign pledges outsource their brains.” You can find that HERE.

And of course I quote Heather Wilson and Martin Heinrich saying why the pledges they signed are good.

Udall & Bingaman Want to Know More on Domestic Spying

Both of New Mexico U.S. senators -- Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall want to know more about the numbers of Americans whose emails and other communications have been peeped at by U.S. intelligence.

Bingaman and Udall joined 10 other senators from both political parties to send a letter to James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. They requested information about Americans’ communications that have been secretly collected by the federal government under the 2008 the FISA Amendments Act.

"We are concerned that Congress and the public do not currently have a full understanding of the impact that this law has had on the privacy of law-abiding Americans,” the letter said. “We are alarmed that the intelligence community has stated that ‘it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located inside the United States whose communications may have been reviewed’ under the FISA Amendments Act."

FISA is short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A news release from the senators today says:

Section 702 of the FISA statute (which was created by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008) gave the government new authorities to collect the communications of foreigners located outside the U.S. The executive branch has said that it cannot estimate how many American citizens may have been swept up in section 702 collections and the current law offers no prohibition against searching that collection of communications obtained without a warrant for communications of American citizens. The Senators state that this loophole should be closed.

Besides Udall and Bingaman, the other senators signing the letter were Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Mike Lee (R- Utah), Bernie Sanders (I-VT.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Dick Durbin (D-Il.)

It's interesting that the two Republican senators, Paul and Lee both are associated with the Tea Party, while many of the Democratic signers, including Udall, are associated with the progressive wing of their party. Concerns about privacy and government intrusion are consistent with both the philosophies of both factions.

Below is the letter:


Clapper Letter