I am addressing you directly because it is abundantly clear that the New Hampshire Law Enforcement, Judiciary, and Bar are more interested in covering up corruption than addressing it. This means members of the public, with the help of certain journalists, are left addressing it themselves. It’s a sorry state that our public funds have been abused so much by the very people whom we pay & entrust to uphold and execute laws.
If none of you respect your oath of office then what good are you to the public?
The fact that it has taken 6 years for the information on Rep. Jonathan Stone’s police misconduct to come out is despicable. Who wanted to protect it from coming out? You did when you were Attorney General and on your fake claim to care about children and their safety. You didn’t care about children or their safety, you cared about protecting a circle of corruption that spreads through law enforcement, city councils, attorneys offices and the AG’s office.
In August 2018 you argued that the Laurie List should remain private. It was a few months after James F McLaughlin’s name had been added to the Laurie List by the City of Keene/Keene Police. James F McLaughlin was working for you on the Grand Jury Criminal Investigation into St Paul’s School in June 2018. It should have been your duty to inform St. Paul’s School and the public of James F McLaughlin’s dishonest and violent record but you didn’t. Instead, Chuck Douglas Esq received the benefit of that Grand Jury Criminal Investigation to file multiple suits against the School – all settled out of court.
Now we must ask whether any of the claims against St Paul’s School were real, fabricated or designed to blackmail by forcing the school into a situation to pay up in order to cover up worse crimes for which previous crooked deals had been made by Concord Police. I believe it is the latter and I believe that the worse crimes were known about by your office, by your predecessors such as Michael Delaney and by Concord PD, the NHCADSV and the DCYF.
Blackmail is a class A felony in New Hampshire.
Brady v Maryland requires all exculpatory evidence to be made known to defendants.
The Anti-Lobbying Act forbids certain activities that you and those NGOs and elected representatives working with you have ignored.
Did they not teach you that at Cornell Law School? Do they not teach that at UNH Law?
You were an NH Bar examiner? What were your standards that all of these laws are simply ignored?
“The New Hampshire Supreme Court is a critically important institution. Its decisions serve as the final word in hundreds of cases every year. Those decisions may implicate our fundamental liberties, the rights of the criminally accused, or the scope of the government’s power. Every case resolves legal disputes of great importance to the parties involved. The institution represents the transcendent importance of the rule of law to the protection of our rights, to our democracy, and to our economic system. The Court’s work must be well-reasoned, learned, diligent and fair and impartial.
I am applying for this position because of the opportunity it presents to uphold and advance these ideals and to serve this institution and our citizens. As described in detail in this application, I have the knowledge, experience and skills necessary to serve. I would bring to the Court very strong academic credentials, a record of significant and ongoing scholarship regarding New Hampshire practice, a highly successful career as a private civil litigator, and a long history of leadership in service to the Court, to the profession and to the public. For the last two years, I have served as Attorney General, a position of great scope and responsibility. I will also bring personal qualities that will benefit the Court. I hold myself to the highest standards of professionalism and ethics, I work hard, and I have tried to approach public service with humility and respect.”
Protecting police officers who are on the Laurie List and who have put the public in harm’s way is not approaching public service with humility and respect.
When my letter to John Scippa regarding Police Officer Julie Curtin was forwarded to your office, your assistant AG Jane Young wrote to me to say that Geoffrey Ward (who was copied) would respond. Despite multiple follow ups, he did not. Despite follow ups from Rep. Susan Homola, he stonewalled her and me and then he deleted the files of 28 or more police officers on the Laurie list with no explanation. Who was he reporting to? You. So who was he protecting when he deleted the files of corrupt police officers? You. That is not approaching public service with humility and respect. That is basically sticking two fingers to the public and self-serving.
We want to thank Claire Best for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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Geoffrey Ward is now a federal prosecutor. New Hamsphire’s federal prosecutors have also failed to respect Brady v Maryland by failing to let defendants know that witnesses have been paid to give testimony for a Grand Jury. Judge Landya McAfferty (a St. Paul’s alum) has expressed shock at what is going on with this regard.
“The government’s failure to learn of and disclose these facts was patent prosecutorial misconduct,” Judge Landya McCafferty, chief justice of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, wrote in her order to unseal the records.
“The fact that highly similar misconduct has happened at least twice in this United States Attorney’s Office within a short time span raises concerns about the seriousness to which the government takes its constitutional disclosure obligations.”
I believe that Jane Young was a US Attorney when this happened (Correction- it was John Farley). She was preceded by Scott Murray, who was DA for Merrimack County and who only lists one trial on his US Attorney bio: “State v Owen Labrie – a “victory for victims’ rights”. I strongly disagree. It was a victory for New Hampshire Court & Law Enforcement Corruption, and you know this.
In August 2017, one of the attorneys who had been introduced via Concord PD, Julie Curtin (who also worked with you and James F McLaughlin on the St Paul’s Grand Jury Criminal Investigation), telephoned Owen Labrie, who was waiting for his appeals (appeals which you argued successfully to deny). That attorney admitted that Concord Police were making “crooked deals” with St Paul’s School. He also admitted that the true victim of statutory rape was the son of the senior administrator at the school (by an 18-year-old female student who was suspended for 2 to 3 weeks) – in other words, not his client, Chessy Prout, by Owen Labrie. But he wanted Owen Labrie’s help to gather intel on St. Paul’s School in order to go after its money. There is a reference to the felony-level sexual assault he knew about within the civil case 1:18-cv-00390 filed on May 11, 2018 (Jane Doe v St Paul’s School). Alyssa Dandrea of the Concord Monitor reported on it.
How would a civil attorney referred to the Prout family by Concord Police know about all of this and tell a criminal defendant who he was trying to bribe to go after St Paul’s School’s money? If he knew about the crooked deals in August 2017, then so did you because you opened the Grand Jury Criminal Investigation in July 2017. But you failed to admonish the police for those crooked deals, choosing to cover them up instead.
Working with you in 2019 were the NHCADSV and Amanda Grady Sexton, who were set to be beneficiaries of Rapuano & Does v Dartmouth College, which was in mediation when they launched a social media and phone campaign to block ABC/GMA from airing an interview with Owen Labrie in July 2019. That interview was recorded in Burlington, Vermont, on July 15, 2019, and, from my understanding, it was sent to the Prout family representatives (the attorneys Chuck Douglas, Steven J Kelly, Steven D Silverman) for comment. One of these attorneys (Steven D Silverman) had his license suspended in DC for using media to influence judicial outcome in Doe v Cabrera.
The other two attorneys were also the attorneys who sued Dartmouth in Rapuano & Does v Dartmouth, and they were in mediation with Dartmouth when the ABC/GMA interview should have aired but didn’t. Instead, the Dartmouth suit settled for $14 million, of which $4.9 million went to Chuck Douglas and Steven J Kelly’s law firms, $2.865 million to the NHCADSV (per estimates from news reports), and $75K each to 9 complainants (some of whom had been solicited). The remainder was supposed to go towards better training and other plaintiffs. However, Maha Hasan Alshaawi’s case and the suicide of another student reveal that nothing of the sort happened. Students signed a petition for due process. It was ignored, and your office did nothing.
Public corruption under your tenure as AG, led to deaths and put lives in very serious harm’s way.
Chuck Douglas is Chair of the New Hampshire Judicial Selection Committee. So he has influence over which judges are appointed to his cases. Coincidentally, not one of the suits he filed against St Paul’s School, Dartmouth College, the Diocese of Manchester or DA Robin Davis went to trial. They all settled out of court. Quite the racket you all had going on.
I’ve been told that you yourself asked Father Gordon MacRae if he minded if his name was used for claims against the Diocese of Manchester for quick claims. He’d never met or heard of the person(s) filing. Your civil litigation practice for the Diocese of Manchester relied on quick settlements for false claims against a man who was incarcerated after being denied due process and after prosecutors failed to inform him of James F McLaughlin’s disciplinary records. The “compliance” officer for the Diocese was Edward Arsenault, who was sentenced to prison in 2014, per records on the NH DOJ site by Assistant AG Jane Young. But that was a lie because he was transferred to Keene jail and, while you were AG, released altogether with his restitution miraculously paid off. We shouldn’t trust a single statement on the AG website as a result and we shouldn’t trust anything out of Jane Young’s office either since she is the one who made the statement but is now US Attorney.
It should be noted that you/your office stated that there would be an investigation into Dartmouth College when the civil suit Rapuano & Does v Dartmouth was filed. But nothing happened. It was your alma mater, and the person who appointed you as AG, Governor Chris Sununu, was on the board of trustees for Dartmouth – a non-profit that failed to register conflicts of interest in the case since Sununu signs the approvals for funds to the NHCADSV who were financial beneficiaries from the settlement. They also failed to register conflicts of interest. Your office did nothing. Nor did the Secretary of State.
Dartmouth Professor David Bucci committed suicide in the wake of Rapuano & Does v Dartmouth College. His death should be attributed to the corruption that existed under and was endorsed by you as AG.
He left behind a 10-year-old daughter and his wife, who stated that the negative media in Rapuano & Does v Dartmouth was a contributing factor to his downward spiral. He was denied the right to speak for himself while Steven J Kelly Esq and Amanda Grady Sexton were using a grant from Times Up Legal Defense Fund/NWLC for media to support the narrative for the claimants and thus to enrich themselves from the settlement. They write about how they do this here.
The NCVLI which published the above, and on whose board Steven J Kelly sat, also rewarded Concord PD Julie Curtin for her work in the Labrie trial and recommended Amanda Grady Sexton to you and/or Congresswoman Ann Kuster. $1.6 million was the grant out of which this report was written – a report on how to game the system for police, prosecutors, civil attorneys and NGOs using media.
They used the same tactics for the prosecution of Owen Labrie and the civil suits against St Paul’s School, leaking the suit to Vice Media, Concord Monitor and the Today Show instead of giving the suit to St Paul’s, the respondent. Publicly elected officials for the City of Concord were dictating the media and giving preference to Vice media gossip click-bait journalists over NHPR journalists in the criminal trial that preceded this. That should be utterly shocking.
The same tactics are being used now for the YDC cases. Your office dismissed YDC complaints for “victim negligence” and then referred plaintiffs to the NHCADSV, who work with Russ Rilee and your old partner David Vicinanzo, who represented Exeter when DCYF admitted to deleting files of child sex abuse.
Follow the money, and it doesn’t reflect well on you, the NHCADSV, the AG’s office, the NH Supreme Court, the City of Concord Council, the Police, UNH, and the law firms you are all too closely connected to: Nixon Peabody, Douglas & Leonard, Shaheen & Gordon.
Kids for Cash is an abhorrent business to be in so why are you all in it? Is this the legacy you want to leave behind for the next generation?
I have looked hard for signs of ethical walls between branches of Government in New Hampshire and the independence of the judiciary. There aren’t any, despite what Anne Edwards or others you have endorsed may claim. You are all gaming the system and abusing public funds to do so. You all make sure that your friends get into the gatekeeping positions so that none of the corruption comes out in the open. You all engage in deals behind closed doors, undermining legitimate public inquiry and creating middle-school gossip-worthy baseless rumors while hiding the most horrific of crimes by your friends and colleagues.
What is the point of laws when law enforcers don’t keep them?
Times Up/NWLC has the same PR company as “Its On Us,” which joined the NHCADSV with the #SurvivorsOverRatings to block ABC from airing the interview with Owen Labrie, which would have revealed the admissions from Prout’s attorney, who was introduced to them via Laura L Dunn, Esq., and Concord Police.
Had the interview aired, I believe that Concord Police would have been exposed for the “crooked deals” they were making with St Paul’s School. Crooked deals that were going on under your watch as AG for New Hampshire, who hired Julie Curtin and James McLaughlin for the Grand Jury Criminal Investigation, which the NHCADSV lobbied for. I know about one of those crooked deals because I was contacted by a target of one of them in Spring 2020. As a result of your careless, dangerous and lackadaisical grand jury criminal investigation into St Paul’s School, every member of that community and their families are vulnerable to have had their data unlawfully obtained and used against them – myself included.
The NHCADSV receives “pro bono” legal counsel from David Vicinanzo, your ex-partner at Nixon Peabody when you represented the Diocese of Manchester, which also relied on James F. McLaughlin’s investigations. Chuck Douglas filed dozens of the suits, just like he did with St Paul’s School and Dartmouth College.
Name one benefit to the public out of the Grand Jury Criminal Investigation into St Paul’s School? There isn’t one.
Name one benefit to the public out of the cover ups of extreme corruption in the NH Police Department, the YDC, the DCYF, the NHCADSV? There isn’t one.
Liars beget liars to cover for liars and to pay liars.
The agreement with St Paul’s School was announced by you within hours of Owen Labrie’s NH Supreme Court Appeals for which there were only three judges present because the other two recused themselves.
One wonders what those two judges knew about the extortion racket going on. The extortion racket which you endorsed by authorizing Julie Curtin to get files without warrants from St Paul’s School, to make cold calls to prospective “victims”, to train those for intercept calls to wealthy unsuspecting targets who would hire a local attorney and be told that if they paid up six figures, they could get the threat of charges to go away.
That’s blackmail. Blackmail that seems to be a business model stemming from the early days of James F McLaughlin’s practices as a sex crimes investigator in the 1980s.
Chessy Prout and her family never wanted the trial of Owen Labrie to happen, per her own account. They went along with what Julie Curtin told them to do. Julie Curtin lied on a sworn affidavit, and the NHCADSV acted as agents for the police and prosecutors by publishing tainted media before trial with ex parte comments from the prosecutor designed to influence judicial outcome – a violation of the rules of prosecutor conduct. You ordered a Grand Jury Criminal Investigation into St Paul’s School so the NHCADSV could get a contract; so two corrupt compliance officers, former police officers, could get jobs paid for by St Paul’s School but serving the expansion and corrupt business of the NHCADSV.
Donald Sullivan came out of Alexandria Police Department where his last case, I am informed, apparently involved the framing of a man who discovered that police from another department had body cam footage from interviews with witnesses, which proved his innocence. The man was allegedly set up by Donald Sullivan’s “informant.”
Meanwhile, the NHCADSV used Donald Sullivan on school day afternoons to act as a bouncer at their office downtown and pretend he was an “off-duty police officer” when, in fact, he was under full-time contract with St Paul’s School as an “independent” compliance officer – as part of the settlement agreement you made in 2018. You and your media were all so fixated on the term “independent” before the compliance officer that it’s quite obvious there’s no independence whatsoever. An “Informant”, “snitch”, or “spy” officer would be a more accurate description.
If you all want money out of St. Paul’s, then go and ask for it honestly. It is the fifth largest employer in Concord.
If you want access to alumni information and data then ask for that honestly. Don’t have your minions go in and get the files without warrants or share the information with publicly elected officials unlawfully. It’s a private school, not a gold mine, to be plundered using bribery and blackmail.
For my own part, I am deeply disturbed at how my letter to the LEACT commission got intercepted, my and my family’s information unlawfully obtained, and then used against me by a fake social media address that set out to impersonate several, including Robin Melone, St Paul’s School and Times’ Up. The integrity of your office as AG was entirely lacking.
You/your office wrote to Little Brown in 2020 to complain about the chapters pertaining to Concord PD Julie Curtin and Officer Sean Ford in Lacy Crawford’s “Memoir” “Notes on A Silencing”. It was not “reckless” (as your office claimed) to include these chapters. It was “reckless” and unlawful for you to be endorsing and protecting police corruption for an extortion racket and to cover up violent, abusive, and dishonest police officers.
You weren’t qualified to become AG or Supreme Court Chief Justice (per State requisites for the post). Safety, integrity, and public interest have come in last under your leadership.
Sincerely,
Claire Best Hawley
Editor: The original has been Lightly edited
