First it was the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that scooped West Virginia’s own newspapers on the Heather Bresch/Mike Garrison story, and today it’s the New York Times that has scooped West Virginia’s papers with news that Governor Joe Manchin consulted with DuPont before filing his amicus brief with the state Supreme Court urging them to take DuPont’s appeal of the largest civil penalty ever imposed against it.
The governor’s spokesman said that Mr. Manchin only wanted to ensure that cases involving punitive damages received a full airing from the Supreme Court and that he was not weighing in on behalf of DuPont.
But new documents reveal a more complicated picture.
On June 2, the governor met with the vice president of DuPont and one of the company’s lawyers to discuss the brief, according to records of the meetings obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
The governor also spoke on the phone with DuPont’s chairman and chief executive, Charles O. Holliday Jr., on Nov. 20, 2007, less than a month after the verdict, according to the documents.
Shortly before the governor filed his brief, DuPont lawyers provided his office with two draft briefs that made many of the same arguments he later used in his brief, documents show.
The day Mr. Manchin filed the brief, his office also requested assistance by e-mail from DuPont with the procedural requirements for filing.
Read the whole article to get the full picture. And all of this was revealed by a simple FOIA request. The Charleston Gazette was once again asleep at the wheel.
By looking at the Gazette’s web site, so far they’re ignoring the story, though they’ll probably have something up today or tomorrow similar to the Daily Mail’s Justin Anderson article that simply regurgitates the New York Times story.
Update: I see Larry Messina’s touting the fact that he was the one to break the story of Manchin filing the brief. If only he had dug a little deeper.
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