Kilmartin’s Gift from the Providence Journal’s PolitiFactRI

It’s difficult not to get the impression that higher-ups at the Providence Journal send out word about what political candidates they like to the various department heads, who then line up an advocacy campaign.

Hot on the heels of the editorial board’s inexplicable Friday endorsement of incumbent Attorney General Peter Kilmartin — which, despite some reservations about the incumbent, fails to spare a word to explain why his Republican challenger, Dawson Hodgson, wouldn’t be a better choice — the PolitiFact team printed its own offering on Saturday:

In summary, Peter Kilmartin said that in the past three years, his office has “prosecuted or brought more cases on access to public records than in the previous 12 years combined.”

His office has filed 10 suits since 2011. Lynch had seven during his eight years as Attorney General. Whitehouse had just one during his four years in that office.

We can’t say if the trend is due to previous attorneys general being less aggressive in prosecuting violations of the state’s open government laws than Kilmartin, or if public bodies are getting more brazen in ignoring them.

For his part, Kilmartin’s full statement seemed to imply that the latter was the case, although clearly, the PolitiFactRI team believes Kilmartin’s ostensibly more-aggressive prosecution on this count is an admirable thing.

The possibility that the journalists somehow missed is that the open records law changed during Kilmartin’s term.  Beginning in 2012, the General Assembly modified the Access to Public Records Act in ways that made it very likely that more requests would be filed and, especially, that the attorney general would step in to address complaints.  According to the National Freedom of Information Coalition’s concise list, the change expanded the information that should be considered available to the public, allowed people requesting records to remain anonymous, and (notably) provided that government agencies have to pay the legal fees for parties that find it necessary to sue for information.

Indeed, all but one of the 10 cases filed by Kilmartin came in or after 2012.  (Although, the list posted by PolitiFact doesn’t include months, so some of the 2012 cases could have been before the change went into effect in September.)

I have an inquiry out to the attorney general’s spokeswoman to find out whether the new law means their office receives payments when it wins such cases, but even if it does not, it looks like PolitiFact’s “True” ruling was a bit presumptuous, given its own standards.  Kilmartin’s statement left out important context that would affect how a listener would react to his statement.

If the law changed during his tenure in such a way as to increase the number of requests and complaints and (perhaps) to create incentive for the attorney general’s office to follow up on them, it doesn’t tell one much at all that the guy who’s currently in the office prosecuted more such cases.

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