Secretary Galvin’s Law Breaking Cannot Be Tolerated Valley Patriot Editorial (July, 2014)

Freedom-of-Information

VALLEY PATRIOT EDITORIAL

Four years ago our impotent Attorney General Martha Coakley prosecuted State Treasurer Tim Cahill for running state lottery commercials with our tax money while he was running for governor. State law prohibits elected officials from using tax dollars for advertising 60 days before an election if their name appears on the ballot.

Coakley persecuted Cahill despite the fact that he did not appear in the lottery commercials and his name was never mentioned. Clearly he was not using his office to gain an advantage at election time.

While we find the prosecution of Cahill to be an abuse of office and a waste of taxpayers’ money by Martha Coakley, we find it more repugnant that while Coakley was seeking political revenge against Cahill, she gave a free pass to her pal, Secretary of State Bill Galvin.

Unlike Cahill, Secretary Galvin not only used tax money to run “public service announcements” within the prohibited time frame, he actually appeared in those TV spots, identified himself by name, and ran the commercials all the way up to, and including Election Day.

What’s worse, Secretary of State Bill Galvin is responsible for enforcing the state’s fake public records law. We say fake because the law gives Galvin no authority to penalize those who conceal public documents.

But, while Galvin cannot be held accountable for not enforcing a law that has no penalties, he is certainly responsible for his own refusal to comply with requests to his office to turn over public documents.

You see, Galvin’s rival for Secretary of State, Dave D’Arcangelo has decided to do what the Boston press never bothered to do, request the documents showing how much Galvin spent on those 2010 public service announcements.

First, D’Arcangelo was told that the records didn’t exist. Then he was told they did exist, maybe, but he would have to shell out thousands of dollars to find out, of course, with no guarantee that he would receive all the documents showing Galvin’s illegal expenditures.

We find all of this repulsive.

How can members of the public have confidence in our Secretary of State while he is abusing public tax dollars to benefit his campaign and then abusing his office to conceal those expenses?

Obviously, D’Arcangelo’s reasons for wanting the documents are political. But, these documents belong to the public, not Bill Galvin.

We demand the release of documents by Secretary of State Bill Galvin showing how much of our tax money was wasted on bogus PSA’s designed to help his reelection campaign in 2010.

We further demand that, for once, our impotent Attorney General Martha Coakley do her job and immediately prosecute.
The law is not there to prosecute political enemies as Coakley did to Cahill in 2010. It is there to protect us from law breakers like Bill Galvin.

It is staggering to us that after years of not doing her job, Martha Coakley now wants to be governor of Massachusetts. But we find it even more disturbing that no member of the Boston press bothered to do their job in 2010 by getting the Galvin documents and reporting on his abuses.

The inmates are running the asylum. We only hope the voters take all this into account on Election Day.