Ohio Officials Tried To Cover Up Illegal Record Checks Into Joe The Plumber
After it came to light that Joe the Plumber’s child support records had been illegally accessed in Ohio the officials in charge issued a statement saying that checking on people in the news was “standard procedure” for their department. But the bureaucrat who did the checking is singing a different tune, saying that nobody told her she was checking on a man who was suddenly famous in political circles, and she’s never heard of this policy of checking up on news makers.
That smells like a cover up to me.
Vanessa Niekamp said that when she was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.
Niekamp didn’t know she just had checked on “Joe the Plumber,” who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain’s example in a debate of an average American. …
Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are “thrust into the public spotlight,” amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.
Niekamp told The Dispatch she is unfamiliar with the practice of checking on the newly famous. “I’ve never done that before, I don’t know of anybody in my office who does that and I don’t remember anyone ever doing that,” she said today.
The Columbus Dispatch, which has been doing the heavy-lifting on this story, didn’t get Niekmap’s emails as part of their open records request. The Governor of Ohio is claiming that he doesn’t have to turn them over because Niekamp, as a child support worker, is exempt from the open records law.
But if this is just a routine case of checking the records, why can’t they just release Niekamp’s emails and be done with it? What are they trying to hide? Orders to check Joe’s records from higher up? Like maybe the Governor himself? Or, perhaps most damning, Obama’s campaign?
Who knows. And we won’t know until the folks in Ohio come clean. They shouldn’t be allowed to sweep this under the rug. Bureaucratic intimidation for speaking up in a political campaign has no place in this country.
