On the day Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced that the state and its cities and counties had signed a memorandum of agreement that formalized a $457 million settlement from manufacturers of opioid pain pills, I asked Schmitt’s office a simple question.
Could I please have a copy of the agreement?
There’s an old saying in journalism: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.â€
This saying is, in some ways, the basis for the state’s Sunshine Law, the open records and meetings act that allows journalists, and citizens in general, to keep a watchful eye over their public officials. In Missouri, the person more responsible than anybody else in enforcing the Sunshine Law is the attorney general.
People are also reading…
But when it comes to actually following it, Schmitt is absent without leave.
As I’ve explained in two previous columns, the reason the memorandum is so important, is that it gives a full picture of how that $457 million came to be, and how it will be divided among various government entities, to eventually battle the opioid crisis. That full story of the settlement is much different than the grandiose picture Schmitt paints when he talks about it, so the document is important.
Missouri’s Sunshine Law says that a government body has three days to respond to a request, either providing the document or documents requested or explaining their delay or denial. I asked for the memorandum of understanding on Feb. 18, the same day Schmitt told the public of its existence. I copied his Sunshine Law coordinator, Megan Werdehausen, and his spokesman, Chris Nuelle.
Keep in mind, it’s a document that involves every county and most cities in the state. It is in the hands of many people. Some of those people did what good government officials do, they gave me a copy when I asked for it.
But not Schmitt.
A week later, Werdehausen responded to my request in a two page letter. “The earliest we expect responsive records, if any, to be available is on or about March 2, 2022,†the letter said, before listing eight items that were getting in the way of providing the record that several other people had already given to me.
The only item missing in the list was the one that mattered: “Mr. Schmitt, who is running for the Republican nomination in the U.S. Senate race, doesn’t like you. He also doesn’t care about the Sunshine Law, except when he is citing it in frivolous lawsuits against school districts.â€
OK, to be fair, I made that last paragraph up. But it’s true.
Schmitt has filed massive requests under the Sunshine Law with various school districts, accusing them of hiding from the public information about mask mitigation rules or critical race theory. But those lawsuits, too, are political statements directed toward Republican primary voters.
Hypocritically, Schmitt is ignoring another public document request that I filed related to those lawsuits. Last month, when Schmitt sued many school districts in the state, including most of the ones in St. Louis, he obtained the help of private lawyers to represent some of the parents joining the lawsuits. That’s a highly unusual action. One of the lawyers, Mark C. Milton, is heavily involved in Republican campaign finance matters, so I filed a Sunshine Law request asking for Schmitt’s agreement with Milton.
To Schmitt’s office’s credit, it responded to this request. It said there was no such agreement. Many attorneys I spoke with said that was highly unlikely, so I filed a second Sunshine Law request, asking for all correspondence with Mr. Milton and the other private lawyers.
The office responded to that request and estimated I would have the records by Feb. 7.
That date has come and gone. Schmitt’s office hasn’t responded to any of my follow-up requests seeking the documents.
This is the state of the Sunshine Law in Missouri: The man in charge of making sure the public can keep an eye on public officials is ignoring it. He believes the Sunshine Law is a political weapon, not a public accountability tool.
That leaves all of us in the dark.