After AG’s Opinion, Fargo Police Releases Unredacted Copy of Osmundson Email
MINOT, N.D. — Earlier this month North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem ruled that the City of Fargo had illegally redacted portions of a June email sent by Fargo Police Chief David Todd.
I had obtained the redacted copy of the email by way of an open records request and challenged the redactions with a complaint to Stenehjem’s office. The city had justified the redactions with statutes intended to protect criminal investigations and details about security preparations, but in reality, they were covering up embarrassing things Todd wrote about the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the wake of Stenehjem’s opinion, I asked the Fargo Police Department to reconsider redactions they made to an email disgraced former deputy chief Todd Osmundson had written apologizing for his activities at Black Lives Matter protests in early June.
Osmundson has admitted to infiltrating the protests in plain clothes while drinking alcohol and joining in with profanity-laced chants against his own department’s officers. I obtained his email after I was tipped off to its existence by Fargo PD personnel but it, like Todd’s email, was heavily redacted.
The Fargo PD has now provided me with an unredacted copy, which you can read below. “After reviewing the Attorney General’s recent opinion with the City Attorney, there are no redactions to this document,” Fargo Police Sgt. Tom Shaw told me.
