The thick plottens.
An accusatory E-mail was sent to Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County (AMCD) commissioners, purporting to be from a mosquito control district manager out West, purporting to quote an AMCD manager's conversation in a restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky during the recent meeting of the American Mosquito Control Association.
I will not quote the E-mail or name the purported author -- it appears to be a forgery. While the facts in it may be true, the "author" says he did not write it.
I have called the purported "author" of the E-mail. He he told me he did not write it, that he had no knowledge of its contents, and that he has never had the E-mail address appearing in the message.
Cui bono? ("Who benefits?")
Someone who dislikes the manager in quo?
Rivals of the manager in quo?
Someone who wants to sew strife at AMCD?
Someone who wants St. Johns County to take over AMCD?
Someone who wants to generate legal or professional consulting bills?
Someone who wants the job of the manager in quo?
Or someone who really, really likes the manager in quo and wants to protect that person's job (by seeing if AMCD commissioners would discuss or take action based on the memo)?
Remember the 2004 setup of Dan Rather and CBS News on George W. Bush's Texas National Guard records (accurate information set forth in materially altered document bearing proportional spacing allegedly not available on typewriters or word processors at the time of the documents -- this destroyed the credibility of people making truthful statements about Bush's National Guard service -- a Machiavellian setup worthy of KARL ROVE or one of its minions).
In any event, it appears that there is a Mosquito Machiavelli out there who thought they could pull the wool over Commissioners' eyes with rank hearsay, unexamined and unverified. Who is it?
In any event, I detected with one telephone call that the E-mail in quo was a forgery and so advised the Chair, another Commissioner and the General Counsel for AMCD.
The FBI has jurisdiction over computer crimes, including forgery.
As Dan Rather once ended his CBS News broadcast, "Courage."
For all local government officials who might be tempted or asked to fire top agency officials, they need to listen to all of the facts and not be swayed by unreliable hearsay. This is especially true if the person in question is someone who don't like -- the Constitution protects the unpopular. For that reason, in recommending that the City of St. Augustine fire City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS, I have always suggested that they afford him the right to an open, public Due Process hearing.
The United States Supreme Court in Greene v. McElroy, 360 U.S. 474 (1959), addressed McCarthy-era security clearance revocations, which were often based upon unverified hearsay allegations. Some of those revocations were based on "wiretaps" (as one Supreme Court justice was heard to whisper to another justice during oral argument, according to an attorney who was there and told me about it).
As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the Court:
"Certain principles have remained relatively immutable in our jurisprudence. One of these is that, where governmental action seriously injures an individual, and the reasonableness of the action depends on fact findings, the evidence used to prove the Government's case must be disclosed to the individual so that he has an opportunity to show that it is untrue. While this is important in the case of documentary evidence, it is even more important where the evidence consists of the testimony of individuals whose memory might be faulty or who, in fact, might be perjurers or persons motivated by malice, vindictiveness, intolerance, prejudice, or jealousy. We have formalized these protections in the requirements of confrontation and cross-examination. They have ancient roots."
Greene v. McElroy, 360 U.S. 474, 496 (1959)
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