What Is Howard Dean Hiding?

NEW YORK – PRNewswire – As investigative reporters and "oppo" researchers flock to Vermont to dig into Howard Dean's past, they have run into a roadblock.

A large chunk of Dean's records as governor are locked in a remote state warehouse, the result of an aggressive legal strategy designed in part to protect Dean from political attacks.

Dean, who has blasted the Bush administration for excessive secrecy, candidly acknowledged that politics was a major reason for locking up his own files when he left office last January.

He told Vermont Public Radio he was putting a 10-year seal on many of his official papers – four years longer than previous Vermont governors – because of "future political considerations. ... We didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time."

"Most of the records are open," said Dean spokeswoman Tricia Enright, adding that there is "absolutely not" a "smoking gun" in those for which Dean has claimed "executive privilege."

Still, Dean's efforts to keep official papers secret appear unusually extensive. Late last year, Newsweek has learned, Dean's chief counsel sent a directive to all state agencies ordering them to cull their files and remove all correspondence that bore Dean's name – and ship them to the governor's office to be reviewed for "privilege" claims.

This removed a "significant number of records" from state files, said Michael McShane, an assistant Vermont attorney general.

The battle over Dean's records began last year when three Vermont newspapers took him to court after being denied access to his official schedule.

Reporters were trying to track Dean's out-of-state political trips. State lawyers argued that release of the schedule could jeopardize his safety and that the governor's office was not a public "agency" covered by state open-records law – two notions rejected by the Vermont Supreme Court. (The court ultimately ruled that those portions of the schedule related to his political trips had to be released, but those relating to state policy could be redacted.)

Then last January, Dean's chief counsel, David Rocchio, negotiated a sweeping agreement that resulted in about 140 boxes of Dean records containing several hundred thousand pages of documents being locked up for 10 years at a state archive in Middlesex, said Greg Sanford, the state archivist.

The sealed papers include Dean's correspondence with advisers on, among other matters, Vermont's "civil unions" law and a state agency that critics charged was used to grant tax credits to Dean's favored firms.

Rocchio said the sealing agreement was driven by "legitimate" policy concerns, but also by, he later acknowledged, political factors. "All you have to do is look at what [Dean's opponents] are doing with the existing records," he said. "They're distorting his record."

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