Update On Leingang/Blunt Dismissal
Last night news broke that criminal charges against North Dakota Workforce Safety officials Romi Leingang and Sandy Blunt. There weren’t many details about the dismissal last night (you can read the motion to dismiss by clicking here), but today AP reporter Dale Wetzel has an article in the Williston Herald that has more information.
It boils down to this: The prosecution filed a motion to dismiss because a WSI lawyer, Jodi Bjornson, recalled that she had told Leingang that obtaining access to the driver’s license photos was legal since the photos weren’t, in her opinion after reviewing the law, confidential. The charges pending against Leingang and Blunt stemmed from misuse of said photos during a search to find which disgruntled ex-WSI employee was sending disruptive emails to current WSI employees.
The Forum article last night indicated that this disclosure from Bjornson happened during a “re-interview,” which suggests to me that Bjornson changed her story.
Regardless, that Leingang and Blunt received bad legal advice from a WSI lawyer is hardly their fault, so they are off the hook. What awaits Bjornson is hard to say. What’s really troubling is that this case has been going on for months now, costing the taxpayers a lot of money and disrupting operations at one of the government’s largest agencies, and it’s all turning out to be a big nothing despite partisan agitating to the contrary.
How the prosecutors could have let the case get this far without coming across the fact that Bjornson dismissed bad legal advice is beyond me. It smacks of shoddy work, and possibly politically-motivated to boot.












