Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Six

Why is Rich Aubuchon still in my newspaper?  

One of the unanswered questions on the Blunt administration's bungled handling of the Scott Eckersely affair centers on why Office of Administration counsel Rich Aubuchon has been the designated point person for Blunt in dealing with the media.  Aubuchon, who proved right from the very beginning that he is willing to lie to reporters, has inexplicably been the mouthpiece for Blunt on this matter despite serving a role outside the governor's office.

Again today we see Aubuchon spinning yarns in an effort to defend the indefensible, this time in a melodramatic letter to the Springfield News-Leader.  ­One bit:

With respect to the former employee's narrative, it is common that a dismissed employee will have claims in disagreement with a decision. In this case, not atypically, the former employee's version is not only inaccurate, but self-serving. In this context, let me address a false statement that was accepted at face value by the newspaper. We have no record that Eckersley ever wrote or stated that the practices of the governor's office were inconsistent with any law or standard on record retention.

Here we again have Aubuchon making statements intended for public consumption whose primary purpose are to confuse and distort.  Aubuchon is suggesting that there are no documents proving Eckersley's claim that he voiced concern about records retention to others on the governor's staff --a claim debunked just days ago by reporters at a Blunt press event. 

Notice that while Aubuchon's letter is intended to spread misinformation (e.g., to keep up the illusion that Eckersley never brought up his Sunshine concerns) he is careful in his phrasing of the statement.  Aubuchon doesn't say that no records exist or ever existed of Eckersley's objection to email policy, but rather narrowly states that "we have no record" of such an objection.  Such a statement would be fully consistent with a scenario in which such documents at one point existed within the Governor's office but have since been destroyed.

But returning to my initial question: why can't the Governor's official spokesman Rich Chrismer or his chief of staff Ed Martin (from whom no one has heard since this story broke) provide insight on what the governor's staff did in relation to the Eckersley case?  They, after all, would have first-hand knowledge of these matters while Aubuchon has access only to the faulty information and innuendo which has been spoon-fed to him. 

Perversely, Team Blunt is using Aubuchon to answer questions because they want to limit discussion to a technical --and ultimately meaningless-- question of whether certain documents still exist somewhere on a server or in a portfolio in the Governor's office rather than engaging in the important question of personal knowledge of Eckersley's concerns by those in the Governor's inner circle or the Governor himself.  Team Blunt wants to keep the focus on the sideshow by debating whether documentary evidence of Eckersley's objections exist while assiduously avoiding the question of their own first-hand experience with Eckersley's objections. 

So instead of having Matt Blunt or Ed Martin answer the relevant questions, they send a second-rate hack attorney out there to run interference and slow the march of facts down to a crawl, knowing that when Aubuchon's lying gets too outrageous they can simply throw him overboard and no one in the inner circle will be any worse for the wear.

The entire Eckersley scandal is about the forced opacity of Matt Blunt's regime.  And Rich Aubuchon stands as a human reminder of the Blunt administration's constant efforts to do whatever it can to keep facts from becoming known.  It's time that the real players in this debacle start answering questions.