The epic staring contest between UVA and Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli will continue for at least a few more days. Despite an August 20 hearing in Albemarle County Circuit Court over whether UVA must comply with a civil investigative demand for a former climate professor’s research and e-mails, Judge Paul M. Peatross gave himself a 10-day deadline to issue a ruling.
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A lawyer for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (right) told an Albemarle County court that former UVA climate scientist Michael Mann is under investigation for “a consistent pattern of premeditated manipulation of data.” |
“I was hoping to issue a ruling from the bench,” said Peatross, but the 75-minute hearing gave him too much to chew on.
Though the legal arguments largely involve arcane technicalities—such as whether UVA is a corporation or a state agency—the underlying issue is whether this is a political witch hunt or a valid investigation.
It started in May, when Republican AG Cuccinelli swung his legal guns on former UVA climate professor Michael E. Mann. Though hired away by Penn State in 2005, Mann was one of several scientists implicated in the recent “climate-gate” controversy. Many of his e-mails were hacked from a server in England and published online, and global warming skeptics sniffed a noxious whiff of data deliberately doctored or suppressed. Yet sundry investigations in Great Britain and the U.S. have found no evidence of fraud or malpractice.
So DIY Cuccinelli started his own investigation. Noticing on Mann’s CV that he claimed five grants worth a collective $485,000 from UVA, Cuccinelli pursued Mann based on Virginia’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act (FATA), and demanded that UVA turn over e-mails Mann sent to and received from 39 scientists and all of his assistants; all documents generated by the grants; and Mann’s computer algorithms, programs and source code. UVA opted for a fight, dropping the “academic freedom” bomb among its concerns.
The battle at last arrived in court on Friday. Deputy AG Wesley Russell did the talking for Cuccinelli, who wasn’t in attendance, while UVA’s oral arguments were handled by its attorney, Chuck Rosenberg. The University received moral support in the form of an amicus brief from organizations that included the ACLU of Virginia and the Charlottesville-based Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression—they too worried about the chilling effect on university research when state prosecutors act in place of peer review.
Judge Peatross took his liberties with the lawyers, poking and prodding their arguments with a slew of questions. He particularly pestered Russell to clarify what the attorney general is investigating—what did Mann supposedly do, and why does the AG think he did it? FATA requires that a civil investigative demand “state the nature of the conduct constituting the alleged violation.”
Pressed, Russell finally said that Mann was under investigation for “a consistent pattern of premeditated manipulation of data,” referencing the “international controversy” and Mann’s most iconic and controversial research product, a hockey-stick shaped graph of rising temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Attorney General’s office likes to downplay the significance of this civil investigative demand: It only wants to make sure Mann didn’t fake grant applications and bilk Virginia taxpayers of their hard-earned cash; it has nothing to do with the politics of global warming; Mann might very well be exonerated.
“Our office is investigating whether a false claim was presented to the University to secure payment under government-funded grants—nothing more, nothing less,” Cuccinelli said in a statement released after the hearing.
Which would be more convincing if Mann weren’t a controversial climate scientist who believes in anthropogenic climate change and Cuccinelli weren’t a vocal global warming skeptic who’s also suing the Environmental Protection Agency based on “climate-gate.”
Rosenberg concluded his remarks by quoting an open letter to Cuccinelli from Thomas Fuller, one of Mann’s critics, asking that the AG drop the matter. “No matter what has prompted your investigation, there is no doubt that it will be interpreted as a witch hunt.”