Fear And Loathing In Minneapolis

Part two of Eric Black's expose into the Minnesota Attorney General's office is out today. After a brief summation of former AG Mike Hatch's career (attorney, chairman of the DFL Party, Minnesota commerce commissioner, a two-term attorney general and a three-time candidate for governor), Black recounts some of the more tawdry events in the AG's political career.

In 1994, when he realized he couldn't get the endorsement, he threw his support to state Sen. John Marty against his chief rival for the endorsement, Mike Freeman. A Star Tribune article at the time said Hatch believed Marty would be easier to beat in a primary than Mike Freeman. It worked, as far as knocking off Freeman, who kept his pledge to drop out if he lost the endorsement, but Hatch lost in the primary anyway.

In 2006, after Hatch's protégé Lori Swanson had entered the race for the DFL attorney general nomination, Hatch encouraged former state Rep. Bill Luther to get into the primary field. Luther, who had a previous reputation as a relentless fundraiser and campaigner, entered the race but didn't raise much money and didn't campaign very hard. He received just 21 percent of the vote in the three-candidate field. Most DFLers to whom I talked about it subscribe to the belief that this was another clever but devious Hatch trick. Swanson, who was clearly Hatch's chosen successor, was able to win a close primary over DFL endorsee state Sen. Steve Kelley. The widely accepted theory is that Hatch believed if Swanson was the only woman against two men, she could win. If so, it worked. Swanson was nominated with a 42 percent plurality.

Black knew that this would have the appearance of being one sided so he went out of his way to find supporters of the former AG to interview.

Hatch certainly has friends, allies and admirers. (How else, in spite of his critics, could he have handily won both the DFL gubernatorial endorsement and primary in 2006?)

His work ethic is legendary. No one, not even Hatch, denies the temper, but his friends see it as an excess of populist zeal. They believe Hatch has accumulated critics and enemies because he is a tough fighter...Because so many of the sources I interviewed for this series have developed a dim view of Hatch's tenure as attorney general, I sought out someone who had a lot of dealings with Hatch and was an admirer. I was referred to Jim Bernstein, a former Minnesota commerce commissioner.

He said Hatch had been an outstanding AG and he maintained "nothing but the highest admiration" for him. (In the interest of full disclosure, Bernstein pointed out that he has a contract with the attorney general's office.)

However, the former AG seems to have more detractors than he has admirers as witnessed by this remark by one of Minnesota's First Families of Politics.

Another source, who worked under Hatch as well as Hatch's predecessor, Hubert H. "Skip" Humphrey III, put it more bluntly: "Mike Hatch is the last person in the world whose shit list I want to be on. Even when he's out of office, just his presence on the planet. He's a very nasty person. I don't have enough interest in the truth being known to risk anything professionally."

Still, is the threat as real as it appears. After all, Black quotes one anonymous former staffer as saying "It's funny how much power we give them (Hatch and Swanson) in our minds,". Could the threat be that real?

During our weekly Blog Talk Radio program, Jazz Shaw and I discussed the developments in this story and remarked about how interesting it was that Attorneys General seem to have this kind of "above the law attitude" (we referenced Jazz's former AG Eliot Spitzer and North Carolina's Mike Nifong as examples) which led me to half jokingly inquire "what is it with this office?" The answer can be found in Black's report.

The office of attorney general carries with it enormous discretion to mete out benefits and pain. On the plus side, for example, the attorney general can appoint private lawyers to represent state interests. This includes not only the lucrative state bond work that was referred to in the first installment, but also appointments to handle big cases for the state...On the other hand, the attorney general has near-total discretionary power to prosecute, sue or investigate people, companies and organizations.

Many of those who have left the AG's office express a clear concern that Hatch and Swanson (most of these sources believe that Hatch still has enormous influence over Swanson) will sue or investigate their company or organization, even retaliate against the clients of their law firm, in order to punish them.

In fairness to the AG's, Black asked for names of people who had been "ruined" by the AG's office retaliating for some supposed slight.

They speak as if Hatch (and Swanson) is the kind of junkyard brawler who will do whatever is necessary to make them pay. They speak as if the circles of their acquaintance are littered with the ruined lives of those who crossed Mike Hatch.

So I've been pushing them: Tell me the names of those whose lives or careers were destroyed so I can confirm the details...But the actual damage done to the targets of Hatch's wrath seems minor compared to the level of the fear. Many who left the AG's office unhappy and bitter have gone on to bigger and better jobs and lives. In the most famous cases in which threats of retaliation were made, the threats were not fulfilled. There is a serious disconnect between the facts and the fear.

Emphasis mine. Even though there is a "disconnect" between the facts and the fear, the fear is enough to make people, including non-partisan Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles, think twice about putting name to accusation.

One of my sources, who also testified to Legislative Auditor James Nobles about his experiences in the office, said that even Nobles encouraged him to think hard about whether he wanted his identity to be disclosed in the auditor's report that will soon be published.

One person willing to go on the record is Amy Brendmoen. While not an AAG, Brendmoen was an 11 year employee of the AG's office and she did see some things that puzzled her.

He never yelled at her, although she did witness one of Hatch's screaming, cursing, table-pounding tantrums, and was mostly puzzled by it. "The banging and red-faced crap was all pretty unnecessary," she said. "We were all on the same side" on the matter under discussion and everyone was doing the best work they could. She didn't believe that such displays were the best way to motivate the troops.

She was often puzzled by the Hatch team's insistence on the "lazy staff" explanation for the problems of the office. The people who worked in the office were "hardworking, bright, committed and they were treated as if they were just the opposite," Brendmoen said.

Her career in the AG office ended in what appears to be typical Hatch fashion.

After Swanson's election, Hatch informed Brendmoen that she wouldn't be kept on either as spokeswoman or be offered her old investigator's job back. He offered her a demotion with a 25 percent pay cut. She assumes she was supposed to quit over that, but when she indicated she would think about it (because the mother of three couldn't afford to be unemployed), Hatch told her she really needed to leave.

Brendmoen suspects that her termination may have been caused by her friendship to AG office employees who were pro-union. What leads her to that suspicion? A couple of very strange phone calls to her new place of employment...

The first call was to her, at work, from a young man claiming to work for Lois Quam, wife of Hatch's political foe, Matt Entenza. The caller asked Brendmoen to write a post for "the family" on a blog that the union organizers have created. Brendmoen took that call to be an effort to trick her into confirming Hatch's and Swanson's theory that Entenza is behind the union movement. (As far as Brendmoen knows, Entenza and Quam have nothing to do with it, and the answers she gave to the caller would not have confirmed the suspicion.)

The next call was a message left for her new boss. The message, claiming to be "on behalf of Matt and Lois," thanked her boss for allowing Brendmoen to spend company time helping her former colleagues with their union drive. This one, she assumes, was designed to undermine her in her new job. She can't say for sure that Hatch and Swanson were behind the calls, but she found them "threatening and unsettling, but also immature and unbecoming."

If there is anything good to come out of this expose, it is that more and more former AAG's are coming forward - some even willing to put their careers on the line in order to give credence to the anonymous sources.

On Wednesday, after the first installment of this series had been published, I got a call from another former official of the office who was willing to speak for attribution.

Bob Stanich of Minneapolis was an assistant attorney general for 19 years, spanning the Humphrey and early Hatch years...The two big differences between the two administrations was the "climate of fear" that Hatch brought to the office and the increased level of politicization...
Hatch was the kind of boss who wanted things done a certain way, but didn't want to tell you what it was, Stanich said. "You were supposed to guess," he said, and if you guessed wrong, it could easily blow up in your face. That management style makes everyone jumpy.

There are many more stories like this, but Black closes with one that, if true, could add even more fuel to the anti-AG fire.....

This parting anecdote comes from a former department head in the AG's office who was involuntarily transferred out of his supervisory position in late 2006. He was told it was because he wasn't working his staff hard enough. But the woman who took his place told him that she had been sent in to "manage [a particular employee] out of the office." The woman said she was chosen because she had some experience at getting people to leave whom Hatch and Swanson couldn't easily threaten with dismissal.

This particular employee fit that category because he is a former policeman who lost one of his legs, at the knee, in the line of duty. Because of his disability, he has special protection from arbitrary dismissal.

The former cop's injury had been acting up and he had missed a lot of work, although his absences had been approved under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. The leaves were unpaid. When the ex-cop was able to work, the quality of his work was excellent. My source concluded that the bosses were concerned that the absences could create an embarrassment for the office.

He was outraged. Scheming to get rid of a disabled person violates civil rights law, he said, "and bear in mind, this office is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws."

Emphasis mine. The employee in question did find out about the plot and when he confronted the manager, he got a raise instead of being fired. However, he ended up quitting the job (for some strange reason) and instead filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint which is still pending. If there is any merit to this complaint, the either AG could be in a world of hurt.

As I said before, these are serious charges - no matter who the AG is. There are serious allegations of wrong doing that need to be thoroughly investigated and where necessary prosecuted. The Attorney General's office is supposed to be a place where the rule of law is sacrosanct. However, when your "top cop" feels that he (or she) is above the law that s/he was elected to enforce, then corrective measures need to be taken as quickly as possible in order to regain the publics trust in the system. Let us hope that Legislative Auditor Nobles gets to the facts of the situation sooner rather than later so that we can all move forward and then maybe the AG's office can do what they are supposed to do....look out for the citizens of Minnesota and not just the AG's political career.