Last night I received a copy of the Colorado Supreme Court’s Attorney Regulation Counsel decision in the matter of Stephen Scott McInnis, No. 10-02301. The documents are shown below and are also available on Scribd.
As I read through the documents I was particularly struck by the following. The Hasan Foundation apparently had written documentation at the time of the Denver Post investigation in which Scott McInnis disclosed the “retention of a research assistant. . .” This “written” information was contrary to the Hasan Foundation’s press release in 2010. I searched the Hasan website for that press release today and did a quick Internet search for that press but have not found it.
Why wouldn’t the Hasan Foundation search all of it’s written records at the time of this controversy? Before issuing a press release that might contain information contrary to the information contained within the Foundation a more thorough search should have been conducted. If Mr. McInnis had, indeed, written to the Hasan Family Foundation informing them of the hiring of a research assistant, why wouldn’t Mr. McInnis conduct a more thorough search of his records and release that communication during the time of the controversy? It would be interesting to know what kind of due diligence was done to search for those records by both parties and the Denver Post when it was investigating this matter during the election.
The remainder of the documents from the Regulation Counsel imply that much of the information considered by the Court’s investigation was obtained through witness testimony and corroboration. Nonetheless, the interesting aspect of this entire matter is that it appears there was at least some mitigating evidence at the time of the controversy which neither party, nor the Denver Post, sufficiently searched for or disclosed. Likewise, the disclosure of a written memo or other writing from McInnis to the Hasan Foundation would have mitigated some of the controversy in the midst of the gubernatorial election.
The disclosure of these materials does not change the poor way the entire controversy was handled, nor does it exonerate the Denver Post which had been accused of “going after” Scott McInnis unfairly. What these letters disclose is that once again, the underlying act that was at the center of the controversy may not have been all that bad to begin with and that the greater problem was how all the parties reacted and responded to the issue when it surfaced.
