Mark Shurtleff
Last June, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff fired off an apparently angry letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder about the state’s U.S. Attorney. At the time, state officials were livid about a federal round-up of Utahans suspected of illegally selling Indian artifacts plundered from burial grounds. More than 100 armed federal agents conducted raids on the homes of 24 suspects – overkill, Utah officials argued. Shurtleff took aim at Brett Tolman, the state’s top federal prosecutor, whom he accused of not cooperating with state and local counterparts.
Well, that law enforcement spat didn’t look good, and Shurtleff and Tolman quickly made up. But now, the letter Shurtleff sent in the heat of the moment might become public.
The Utah Records Committee on Thursday voted 6-1 to require Shurtleff to release his letter to Holder, which he’d mailed to the AG’s home address in Washington, The Salt Lake Tribune reported today.
Brett Tolman (gov)
While Shurtleff has discussed the letter in general terms, he has denied a request by The Tribune to release the letter. The Tribune appealed to the records committee, which produced Thursday’s decision. Despite requests from Tolman’s lawyers not to release the letter, committee member Scott Daniels said the letter is “clearly about a public matter.”
According to Jerrold Jensen, a lawyer for Shurtleff, the state attorney general has the authority to keep the letter private, noting a 1990 Utah Supreme Court ruling regarding “executive privilege.” In addition, because the relevant issues have since been resolved, the disclosure of the letter would create unnecessary drama, according to Jensen. “To disclose the letter now, given the current state of affairs, would not benefit the public,” Jensen said.
Michael O’Brien, an attorney for The Tribune, disagreed with the public officials’ privacy claims and said the state legislature had negated the 1990 ruling. He said the letter is “about something inherently in the public interest; about how Utah’s two top lawmen are working or not working with one another.”
Shurtleff can appeal the committee’s ruling to state court.
The two-year artifacts case has netted 26 indictments so far. But it also produced an anti-government backlash in Utah. Two defendants committed suicide. A man with alleged ties to white supremacists was charged with threatening to tie a government informant to a tree and beat him with a baseball bat. A local sheriff said he wanted to file charges against the feds over the matter, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) dressed down Holder for the raids at a congressional hearing last June.
