The Shenna Files: Freedom of Access Under the Democrat Uniparty

In December 2023, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows made the unilateral decision to remove Republican President-elect Donald Trump from Maine’s 2024 ballots. The decision came in response to a complaint brought by a hodgepodge of Republican lobbyists and left-wing political operatives, including Sec. Bellows’ longtime friend and former employer, Ethan Strimling.

Naturally, there were a lot of questions in Maine and across the country about this controversial decision. As a result, the Maine Wire submitted several Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) requests to the Secretary of State’s (SOS) office seeking records that would shed light on how Bellows arrived at her controversial decision. Our requests asked for internal communications about the Trump decision, as well as communications with outside groups and media. We also asked for Bellows’ schedules.

What ensued was a Kafkaesque struggle to wrest a bare minimum of transparency from Bellows’ office, a saga that would bore every reader to tears. Nearly one year later, with Trump’s re-election in the rearview mirror, we still don’t have all the documents we requested. Some of our follow-up requests and inquiries about redactions have been rebuffed or ignored. In short, Bellows ruled that Mainers should not be allowed to vote for the now-incoming President of the United States and proceeded to refuse for nearly a year to provide basic transparency in response to journalistic inquiries. Her failure to provide all the documents we’ve asked for continues.

Keep in mind, as you read this, that Gov. Janet Mills, when she was Attorney General, told then-Gov. Paul LePage that 22 days was a sufficient time period to totally and completely respond to any FOAA request.

Here is a basic summation of the still-incomplete process to get transparency from Bellows, the former Executive Director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union:

• We asked for records at the end of December, and the SOS acknowledged receiving our requests, as required under statute. Importantly, at no point did the SOS claim our record request was over broad or unduly burdensome in nature. That’s because it was specifically tailored, limited in scope, and relevant to a matter of national news concern. They nonetheless proceeded to ignore the requests for months.
• We followed up on Feb. 15 at the 65-day point and again March at the 90-day point. Those inquiries went totally ignored. By this point, we had our attorneys at Consovoy McCarthy intervene and begin raising the prospect of legal action.
• In April, at the 100-day mark and still no records produced, we solicited help from the once-prestigious defender of journalism, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). We did this mostly as a joke, as we understand that the formerly heroic defenders of the First Amendment are now government bootlickers.
• In May, the SOS began the tortuous process of partially complying with one aspect of one of our requests. These emails revealed that Bellows met with Gov. Mills on the eve of the infamous Trump hearing — a meeting that no one in the Maine media thought was interesting, a meeting neither Mills nor Bellows every answered questions about — but they also revealed that the SOS office suffered debilitating technical issues in the middle of their attempt to strip Trump from the ballot. Newsworthy items which only underscored the value of the documents we had requested.
• In that first disclosure, 130 days after the first requests, SOS attorney Jonathan Bolton wrote, “This completes the Department’s response to your FOAA request.” However, that wasn’t true. Because the SOS had “lost track” of our other requests. Bellows, Deputy Secretary Emily Cook, and Bolton all had to be reminded that we still had several other outstanding requests. It turns out that they hadn’t even started processing those, despite our repeated prods, requests for updates, and threats of legal action. Transparency!

• The staggering incompetence — whether feigned or real — reset the clock on this entire nightmarish fight with the SOS bureaucracy. So began a nearly identical and still incomplete process to fulfill the rest of our requests…

We could continue to bore everyone to tears describing this process, but you get the gist.

We write this less for the news value of the description of this fight and more to illuminate a few basic points that should be of concern to every Mainer.

1. Maine doesn’t have a transparency law. Yes, we have a Freedom of Access Act, but officials like Bellows, Cook, and Bolton can just ignore, delay, ignore, delay, redact, play dumb, half-produce records, delay, ignore until the shot clock runs out or the documents no longer have news value. In most cases, I’m sure people just give up and walk away when faced with intentional bureaucratic hurdles. However, even with me obsessively bugging them and threatening legal action via Consovoy McCarthy, even when our legal team succeeded in bring Gov. Mills to heel on FOAA matters, the strategy of feigned bureaucratic incompetence and lethargy wins. In this instance, it’s Bellows, but this is true of every department at every level of government. If we can’t successfully get basic FOAA requests fulfilled — even with dedicated staff and legal counsel on retainer — what hope do average citizens have of using FOAA as it was intended?
2. Maine’s government employees are trained to do this. Throughout this process, and the process of reporting on state and local government, we have learned that Maine’s taxpayer-funded employees are trained to frustrate FOAA requests by ignoring, over-redacting, refusing to turn over documents, and by otherwise imposing tremendous burdens on journalists and citizens who are seeking access to public records. Government officials know that most people cannot afford attorneys, so their default posture is: ignore the law, force the requester to sue, and if that actually happens then, no worries because we can make excuses and no one actually gets in trouble.
3. Maine’s Freedom of Access Omnbudsman is a largely symbolic position. Maine’s FOAA Ombudsman, Brenda Kielty, is a nice, smart woman. She seems genuinely interested in government transparency and at times frustrated with how FOAA actually works. However, her position is toothless. She has now power. She has no staff. It’s a meaningless position that exists only to advise government agencies. Those agencies don’t even have to accept her advice. As an example, Kielty as advised departments not to setup automatic email responses at dead end email accounts (like FOAARequest.DAFS@maine.gov) in order to comply with the 5-day response requirement. They still do it. When government bureaucrats openly flout FOAA, Kielty can do nothing. Again, she has no power, and her office exists largely as an email account that frustrated citizens can vent into.
4. Maine’s legacy media are totally uninterested in FOAA. Access journalism has taken root so deeply in Maine that most journalists at newspapers or TV stations don’t ever have to go through similar fights. There are exceptions. WGME waged a battle to get information about the costs of Gov. Mills’ out-of-state travel schedule; however, their ordeal was peanuts compared to what the Maine Wire faces with every single request. Perhaps it’s silly and idealistic of me, but I can imagine a time when reporters, even when they disagree about some things, can agree on government transparency, following the law, and the requirement that taxpayer-funded workers answer routine journalistic inquiries. Good luck finding media outlets other than the Maine Wire, WGME, and that one dude from CNN who have complained in the last few years about the lack of transparency in Maine government.
5. Without reform, Maine will continue to have no government transparency. It doesn’t have to be this way. Maine lawmakers can make changes to Maine’s transparency laws that compel government officials to turn over documents within a limited period of time, impose harsh penalties for government officials who miss deadlines and intentionally delay document production, and empower the FOAA Ombudsman to actually enforce all of these laws. This isn’t rocket science. Illinois — where four of the last ten governors have gone to prison — has a better transparency law than Maine. Maryland, with Baltimore not known as a bastion of open government, has a better transparency law than Maine. With very simple, non-controversial steps, Maine can become at least as transparent as Baltimore, Maryland and Chicago, Illinois.

Maine is one of the highest taxed states in the nations. Still, the roads suck, the schools suck, crime is high, and drug-addiction is ripping like a wildfire through virtually every community. Law enforcement is underfunded and unequipped to deal with organized crime groups, foreign and domestic, that continue to take advantage of Mainers, primarily through drug crime. Would any of that get better if Maine had slightly improved transparency laws and a government that was just a bit more accountable? Perhaps. At least it’s worth trying.

Anyways, here’s a link to the documents we’ve managed to get out of Bellows during this nearly year-long fight. We’ve tried to get redactions lifted — like her mysterious five-hour long dinners and lunches around the time of the Trump decision — to no avail. The most recent document production came just a few days before the election, and we’re still in the process of reviewing them all.

The Bellows Files

As you will see, there are thousands of pages, but this is only because the government likes to include duplicates, useless copies of emails, copies of 300-page email attachments, etc. They do this so that, when criticized, they can say, “Hey, we turned over thousands and thousands of pages!” It’s a pantomime of transparency.