Conduct by Oakhill prosecutors make Pentagon Papers 'harmless, defendants' attorneys claim

CLEVELAND

Attorneys for two defendants in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal corruption case accuse prosecutors of abusing confidentiality rules with evidence, and providing The Vindicator with some of that supposedly secret information.

In a court filing, the attorneys for Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally and Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino wrote: “This untamed conduct makes Daniel Ellsberg’s limited release of the ‘Pentagon Papers,’ thought by some at the time to be outrageous, appear harmless.”

Ellsberg provided a top-secret study of the nation’s policies about the Vietnam War to the New York Times in 1971.

The Monday motion from the attorneys — Lynn Maro for McNally and John B. Juhasz for Sciortino — claims prosecutors marked too many documents as “counsel only,” meaning it can’t be shared with anyone.

The attorneys wrote that prosecutors filed a document with the Cuyahoga County Clerk of Courts that included transcripts of a

secret recording that have that designation.

“Among the items that the government claims should be protected by the ‘counsel only’ prophylactic are recordings, the transcripts of which the Youngstown daily ‘newspaper,’ The Vindicator, claims have been publicly released,” they wrote.

They also wrote that the information was given to the newspaper before it was on the public docket.

But the filing was in the possession of the clerk’s office before being given Friday to the media, said Dan Tierney, spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, which is prosecuting the case with the Cuyahoga County prosecutor.

It didn’t make it to the court clerk’s website until a few days later, he said.

“A public record is a public record if it is online or on paper,” he said. “Some court websites are very [quick to file documents] and others not so much. It takes time to upload documents. But that doesn’t change the fact it is a public record.”

Read more about this latest development in the case in Wednesday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.