I wrote on Monday about the lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch on behalf of Legal Insurrection seeking documents withheld by the District of Columbia Office of Attorney General (OAG) and Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) regarding David Gregory’s clear violation of the D.C. gun laws, Legal Insurrection and Judicial Watch file suit to obtain David Gregory gun law violation documents.
My post and the announcement did not garner the attention it deserved, perhaps because the whole world was falling apart in D.C. that day, see Benghazi, IRS-Tea Party Scandal, and AP Phone Records. Oh, and Gosnell. (It’s never too late to tweet and Facebook share that original post or this one, hint, hint.)
But yesterday something else developed. I received a call from Emily Miller at The Washington Times, who does great work on 2nd Amendment issues, to let me know that one of the key documents the OAG would not give me because it supposedly was protected by a Freedom of Information Act exemption already had been given to her by … wait for it … the OAG.
Miller calls it part of a pattern of “dirty tricks” by OAG and MPD she has experienced, and she writes about it today, MILLER: D.C. dirty tricks in Part II of unfolding David Gregory mystery-drama:
Officials in Washington, D.C. are using dirty tactics to hide the investigation and decision not to prosecute David Gregory of NBC News for illegally possessing a “high-capacity” magazine in the District of Columbia.As I wrote in February, my requests to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and the Office of Attorney General (OAG) to turn over the documents in Mr. Gregory’s case were ignored. I finally had to use a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but the attorney general and police only turned over public documents.So I wrote separate extensively-detailed FOIA request to the attorney general, MPD and Mayor Vincent Gray. The police and prosecutor responded with a large amount of documents — 75 percent of them were useless to me (every public email and news story) and seemed to be an effort to bury me in paper. The rest was heavily redacted with big black marks.On Monday, I got a press release from Judicial Watch announced it has filed a FOIA lawsuit against MPD and OAG on behalf of the Legal Insurrection blog. In reading through the documents that were not turned over, I noticed that one that I had gotten — the Jan. 9 letter from the NBC’s lawyer Lee Levine to D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathan.I called William A. Jacobson, the lead author of the legal blog, to tell him I had that letter. “I am shocked that the D.C. attorney general would withhold from us the letter from David Gregory’s attorney using a claim of FOIA exemption, and force us to go to court, when they already gave the letter to another person,” Mr. Jacobson, a clinical professor at Cornell Law School, told me.
Miller has more details in her post.
What are they hiding? Why the games?
None of this surprised me. So much about how the David Gregory case was handled has been cloaked in secrecy.
While an inadvertent violation of the D.C. gun laws will get you written up on charges and prosecuted vigorously if you are a regular citizen, Gregory and others at NBC News were let off the hook even though they explicitly and specifically were told by MPD via email not to use the ammunition magazine on the show because it was illegal.
This never has been about a desire to see David Gregory prosecuted, it’s about OAG’s failure to apply the law equally depending on the social status of the person.
I’m fortunate to have Judicial Watch on my side, whose President is quoted by Miller in her story:
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton is determined to use the lawsuit to shine a light into this black hole, saying, “We want the complete record of this controversial decision not to prosecute Gregory or NBC News, and one of the key documents is the affidavit [prepared by police to support a Warrant for Gregory].”
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