Dann requests previous records

By David Skolnick

The ex-attorney general said he is ‘trying to rebuild my life with my family and my legal practice.’

Former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, a vocal advocate of open records, is asking his former department to fill what is one of the largest public records requests sought from the office.

The request is essentially the 17-month history of Dann as the state’s top lawyer.

“It’s a monster” is how Jim Gravelle, an attorney general spokesman, described the records request from Dann, his former boss. “It was just about any correspondence he ever made as attorney general.”

Among Dann’s requests are “all of the documents personal to me,” including schedules, e-mails and expense records, provided to others through records requests. He also wanted copies of all news clippings related to him or the office’s accomplishments, and all of the “talking points and speeches that I delivered.”

“That’s a lot,” said Ted Hart, another attorney general spokesman hired by Dann, about the request.

The office received Dann’s request July 7. The public records unit of the office’s constitutional law section is working on filling the request. It isn’t known when it will finish.

Why does Dann, who resigned under pressure as attorney general May 14, want all this information?

“I am trying to rebuild my life with my family and my legal practice,” he wrote in a Tuesday e-mail to The Vindicator. “These are all things that will be helpful to me in doing so.”

He didn’t respond to a follow-up e-mail asking how this information will help him reach his goal.

Dann, a Democrat from Liberty, was elected attorney general in 2006. He campaigned largely on a platform of criticizing Republicans, who controlled state government at the time, for permitting and participating in political corruption.

Dann filed numerous public records requests with various state agencies and offices in an effort to draw attention to the corruption, specifically at the state’s Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, and shed new light on it.

Dann’s office, responsible for training government entities on how to properly comply with open records and public meetings laws, started receiving several public document requests from various media outlets almost as soon as he began serving as attorney general in January 2007.

That amount significantly increased when it was learned that two female staffers filed sexual-harassment complaints March 31 against Anthony Gutierrez, then the attorney general’s director of general services and a longtime Dann friend.

The office initially declined April 2 to release three months’ worth of e-mails between Dann and Jessica Utovich, his former scheduler with whom he had an extramarital affair, toThe Columbus Dispatch. The reason given was that the request was “overbroad,” and the e-mails weren’t public records.

Shortly thereafter, the office agreed to the request without any modifications.

Also, an intern for the Ohio Republican Party filed a records request in July 2007 for e-mails to and from top officials in the attorney general’s office — as well as the governor’s, secretary of state’s and treasurer’s offices — over a six-month period.

In March, Dann criticized Republicans for the request, saying it was done “to pervert the purpose” of open records laws. Dann said at the time that the request “was so overly broad that it was not a legitimate request.”

In response, an Ohio Republican spokesman said the state Supreme Court determined the right to inspect public records cannot be stopped by officials who believe it to be a waste of time.

The request still hasn’t been fully filled.

During an investigation into the complaints against Gutierrez, the attorney general’s office would honor records requests from the media by typically releasing thousands of pages of documents at or after 5 p.m.

The results of the investigation, made public May 2, led to the firing of Gutierrez as well as the forced resignation of a top attorney general official and the firing of another. Dann resigned May 14. Since then, about a half-dozen management employees at the office have resigned.

“The requests increased dramatically” between April and June, but have decreased since then, Gravelle said. “We got requests for every e-mail Marc Dann ever sent between January 2007 and May 2008. We’ve processed all of the requests.”

Most of the requests came from journalists, Gravelle said.

The office’s public records unit consists of an attorney and a paralegal with three other lawyers spending about half of their work day handling public records requests, Hart said.

skolnick@vindy.com