Janet Mills Won’t Turn Over Public Records Detailing Her Whereabouts Amid Devastating December Storms: UPDATE

Mainers were evacuating flooded homes, long lines were forming at gas stations, and more than half the state was without power.

Yet for several days during some of the worst power outages Maine has experienced since the Ice Storm of 1998, Gov. Janet Mills (D) was nowhere to be found.

Now, Gov. Mills and her Department of Public Safety (DPS) are continuing to withhold public records sought in January that would shed light on precisely where she was during those crucial initial days, why her office failed to produce any public comment during that period, and what she might have been doing while Mainers fumbled in the darkness to stay dry and warm.

[RELATED: Janet Mills AWOL After Deadly Storm Grinds Maine to a Halt, Hundreds of Thousands Still Without Power As Temps Plunge…]

On Dec. 29, 2023, the Maine Wire filed a request under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act for records from the Executive Protection Unit (EPU), the unit within the Maine State Police (MSP) tasked with protecting the governor and facilitating her travel.

Specifically, the Maine Wire asked for the following public records: All schedules and itineraries related to the Executive Protection Unit’s (EPU) activities from Dec. 14, 2023 through Dec. 20, 2023; all communications exchanged among the EPU officers related to the Governor’s activities from Dec. 14, 2023 through Dec. 20, 2023; all communications between EPU officers and any member of the Governor’s staff Dec. 14, 2023 through Dec. 20, 2023.

The Maine Wire was far from the only outlet to notice that Mills and her staff were conspicuously silent and absent from the public stage.

The only tweet published from Mills’ team as Mainers were struggling with the ongoing wind and rain storm came from press flack Ben Goodman, who shared his concern that December was perhaps a little too early for CVS to be promoting Cadbury Creme eggs.

When the Mills administration finally showed up in public several days after the onset of the mass flooding and power outages, Mills herself laid blame for the state’s apparent lack of preparedness at the feet of the National Weather Service (NWS).

In a statement responding to Mills, the NWS rebuked the governor and presented information that strongly suggested Mills was misleading the public — if not outright lying — about the service’s attempts to alert her administration to the severity of the storm days before it hit.

While the rest of the Maine media may have forgotten about this episode in Maine political history, the Maine Wire has not.

In response to our Dec. 2023 request for public records, Maine State Police Staff Attorney Paul Cavanaugh said on Jan. 19 that our basic journalistic inquiry would cost us $500, a sum we agreed to pay.

“It will likely be a couple of months before I get your records completely reviewed and coordinate with the Governor’s office,” Cavanaugh said in the email. (emphasis added)

“I can’t control when the Governor’s office will respond, but expect it will take some time,” Cavanaugh said. “Consequently, you aren’t likely to see a response until late March or early April.”

Nearly two months after Cavanaugh said the public records would be made available to the Maine Wire and the public, the Maine State Police have not produced those records.

The Maine Wire emailed Cavanaugh on June 5, June 10, and June 19.

None of those requests for an update on the status of our request, including whether the delays were attributable to the Governor’s office, got a response.

The Maine Wire attempted to get answers about Cavanaugh’s unresponsiveness from DPS spokesperson Shannon Moss, who appears to have forwarded the email to Cavanaugh.

Cavanaugh responded quickly addressing an entirely unrelated subject without responding to our January public records request, which he had previously said would be available nearly two months ago.

Cavanaugh only responded regarding the records request on Monday.

That’s when we informed him we would be publishing a story about the opaque process and unnecessary delays that have clouded this public records request — and virtually any attempt to obtain public records from the Mills Administration under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act.

Monday, when asked to comment for this story, Cavanaugh said unnamed events occurring between when he promised to deliver the records and late June had obviated his initial estimate for record production.

“There have been a number of unique events handling by DPS in the last few months that made my initial good faith non-binding estimate clearly overly ambitious,” Cavanaugh said.

Cavanaugh did not respond to a follow up asking him what those events were.

Nor did Cavanaugh provide a new date when the Maine Wire can expect the Mills Administration to turn over a handful of records from a narrow window of time in December.

It’s been 178 days since the Maine Wire asked for a handful of Mills’ schedules for the days surrounding the storm.

This is not the only instance where the Mills Administration has endeavored to frustrate basic journalistic inquiries by imposing unnecessary delays or unreasonably high fees on Maine media outlets.

In May, for example, WGME reported that Mills’ office attempted to charge the outlet more than $1,400 for records related to her out-of-state travel.

A request for high fees, though antithetical to government transparency, is a better response than the Maine Wire typical receives to Freedom of Access Act requests.

The Maine Wire has seven Freedom of Access Act requests pending with the Department of Administrative and Financial Services (DAFS) that have received no response whatsoever, despite multiple follow up emails, apart from an automated message acknowledging the request. (The automated request is a technique some government agencies use in order to comply with the legal requirement that requests for public records be “acknowledged” within five business days.)

One of those requests, submitted in Nov. 2022, relates to how the husband of DAFS Commissioner Kirsten Figueroa, Douglas S. Birgfeld III, landed a job making nearly $140,000 per year in the Department his wife runs after she became commissioner.

DAFS has ignored the request as well as multiple follow-up emails about how the DAFS Commissioner’s husband suddenly landed on the DAFS payroll after she took over DAFS.

DAFS has not responded to that request for 572 days.

Another of the requests we submitted to DAFS was for a list of businesses that had applied for a certain tax credit program.

DAFS has not responded to that request, other than an automated email, for 606 days.

A request the Maine Wire submitted to the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) in June 2023 for records related to the implementation of L.D. 1664 was initially acknowledged, but MDOE Communications Director Marcus Mrowka subsequently ignored an Aug. 15, 2023 request for a cost and time estimate.

Mrowka only responded to a request for an update on June 5, when the Maine Wire CC’d Maine’s Public Access Ombudsman.

The MDOE, 364 days later, has yet to produce any records or time and cost estimates.

In December, the Maine Wire submitted multiple Freedom of Access Act requests to Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) seeking records that might help the public understand how she came to the conclusion that she could unilaterally and unconstitutionally exclude former Republican President Donald Trump from Maine’s elections.

Bellows has responded only partially to one of those requests.

The experience attempting to pry public records from state government and state officials points up how the Mills administration and her Democrat allies have systematically undermined Maine’s government transparency statute by imposing unnecessary delays and fees or by failing to respond in a timely, good faith manner.

Sources in various government positions who have undergone training on how to respond to Freedom of Access Act requests have told the Maine Wire on multiple occasions that the governments policy, especially when it comes to law enforcement matters, is to delay, impose fees, and withhold records even when they are non-exempt and responsive to a request.

The strategy aims to deprive journalists and the public of private records unless they can foot the considerable bill for litigating a request, which is most often the case.

On the legislative side, the Maine Wire asked State Sen. Troy Jackson (D-Aroostook) last year for any supporting documentation that he may have submitted to justify the record-level of reimbursements that he obtained for travel, meals and lodging from 2019 through 2024.

Jackson obtained these reimbursements for travel and lodging as if he were making round-trips from Augusta to his supposed home in Allagash — even though he owned or rented, for almost the entire time in question, a residence in Augusta.

Although the Executive Director of the Legislature partially responded to our request with records showing Jackson received $160k in reimbursements from 2019 to 2023 — more than any other lawmaker in the history of the state — she did not provide receipts or records Jackson may have submitted to obtain that taxpayer cash.

In October, nearly eight months ago, the legislative staffer told the Maine Wire to expect those records in “several months.”

That legislative staffer has not responded to emails asking for an update on when “several months” will have passed.

Ironically, Mills, back when she was Maine Attorney General, sent a Jan. 8, 2014 letter to then-Gov. Paul LePage informing him that just 22 days was a sufficient amount of time to respond to a Freedom of Access Act request.

Delaying for bogus reasons, she counseled LePage, “could result in a court finding that you have acted in bad faith in resisting disclosure.”

The Maine Wire is prepared to exhaust all legal avenues in pursuit of public records that the citizens of Maine deserve to see, especially in cases where the available evidence suggests politicians and government bureaucrats “have acted in bad faith in resisting disclosure.”

UPDATE: When this story was first published, we regrettably forgot that we also submitted a Dec. 19 Freedom of Access Act request to Gov. Janet Mills’ press secretaries, Scott Ogden and Ben Goodman. Her chief counsel, Timothy Feeley, replied on Dec. 27 that we would have records within 2-3 weeks. It’s been 183 days. We have not received those records. We regret the omission, but it’s understandable, since we long ago recognized that the Mills Administration does not handle FOAA requests in good faith.