Burleigh County state’s attorney says she sees no crime in AG’s office email scandal
MINOT, N.D. — For the last week or so there has been a lot of intense focus on Attorney General Drew Wrigley and his decision to eschew an external investigation into the deletion of the official email accounts of his predecessor, Wayne Stenehjem, and his deputy Troy Seibel.
Yesterday, Democrats held a news conference in the state Capitol building, right outside Wrigley’s office, calling on him to “initiate a complete investigation” of the matter.
Wrigley, like Stenehjem a Republican, is making the wrong decision , and ought not to be dismissive of an investigation. Even if he’s right, and no actionable crime has been committed, a breach of the public’s trust in their state government has occurred, and a thorough review, even if just for form’s sake, would help restore that trust.
At the very least, it would create a comprehensive factual record that could be used to pursue policy reforms to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.
But this will-he-or-won’t-he focus on Wrigley is a bit of a distraction and rooted more in partisan motivations than the reality of the situation before us.
