Caldon Rule 60 Motion 24 July 2014

8/10/2019 Caldon Rule 60 Motion 24 July 2014

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Exhibit 1

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Exhibit 2


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Exhibit 3


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By Jeff Chirico - email

MACON, GA (CBS46) -Denise Caldon, of Macon, has repeatedly tried to unseal court records that shesaid contains evidence that the Board of Regents has mismanaged a collegecampus and employment appeals.

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Continue reading >>

Investigation exposes admission that Regents don't read employee appeals

"It will open a Pandora's box, there are so many issues," said Caldon.

Caldon was fired in 2008 after she said she refused to continue falsifyingdocuments at the request of her supervisor, David Bell, former president ofMacon State College, now Middle Georgia State College.

"After I put in writing that I would no longer falsify his leave reports, 9 days later Iwas terminated after 15 years of dedicated service," said Caldon who worked asBell's administrative assistant.

In court papers, Caldon alleged Bell neglected his duties and she covered toprotect him.

"He would never make a full day of work," said Caldon. "It was commonknowledge on campus that we had to limit his meetings. Limit his speakingengagements."

Caldon unsuccessfully appealed her termination to the Board of Regents, thenfiled a whistle blower lawsuit against the Board but lost.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Doris Downs sealed the evidence in thecase which Caldon has sought to unseal four times. Each time, the office of


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Posted: 12:00 a.m. Saturday, July 19, 2014

Ethics memo raises big questions

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RelatedInteractive timeline: Gov. Nathan Deal's ethics caseGeorgia Personnel Rules Governing Political ActivityGeorgia Campaign Law Governing Political ActivityDeal: Staffs contact with ethics chief was harmlessHolly LaBerges memo and the queasy politics of ethicsSam Olens on the hot seat over Holly LaBerge memoOlens defends decision on ethics memo as Deal and Carter sparDeal: Why were we all in the dark on bombshell ethics memo?Ethics chief claims Deal aides pressured her, threatened agencyPDF: Read the memo accusing Gov. Deal's aides of pressuring the state ethics

chief

ByAaron Gould Sheininand James SalzerThe Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionState ethics commission director Holly LaBerge was taking a vacationfrom a job shed held less than a year when a text message poppedinto her personal cellphone from Gov. Nathan Deals chief of staff.So, since you are at the beach, with your feet in the sand andprobably something cold to drink. Does this mean we can resolve allthe DFG (Deal for Governor) issues by Monday?:), Chris Riley wrotein a message sent July 16, 2012, concluding his text with theemoticon for smiley face.No one is smiling anymore. The seemingly innocent text led to aphone conversation that has rocked state government and threatenedthe credibility of top officials, including Attorney General Sam Olens.It has also restoked an election-year fire that the governor had hopedwas all but extinguished over the commissions handling ofcomplaints against his 2010 campaign.In a memo obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week,


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LaBerge said Deals chief counsel pressured her to settle the cases

without a hearing and threatened to withhold rule-making authorityfrom the commission, a top priority for the agency.The memo has raised pointed questions about the conduct ofLaBerge, the governors staff and Olens, who received a copy of thememo but did not turn it over to former ethics staff members suing thestate.Here are five big questions the memo raises:1. Was it proper for chief counsel Ryan Teague and Riley tocontact LaBerge on an issue involving complaints against thegovernors campaign?

State law and personnel rules prohibit state employees fromengaging in political activities at work or using state resources to aidcampaigns. The personnel rules specifically prohibit employees fromusing coercive political pressure.In her memo, LaBerge said she felt pressured by Teague to makethe complaints go away. Atthe time, the commission wasinvestigating a series of complaints against Deals 2010 campaign forgovernor, centering on how he raised and spent campaign funds,including how he paid attorneys fees and for air travel.State and local officials have frequently been fined by the state ethics

commission over the past 20 years for doing campaign work or usingpublic resources for campaigns. Local officials are often accused ofusing their office or government resources to push sales-tax or bondvotes. State staffers have been used to send out invitations tofundraisers, and they regularly post tweets with Twitter handles likeStone4Georgia or Beachforsenate.When you are in a state facility and on state time, you have a duty tothe public, said Teddy Lee, a former longtime director of the ethicscommission. State employees dont always see it that way.Deal vigorously defends his staffers, saying they were merely

contacting LaBerge to figure out the schedule for an upcominghearing on his case. Aides said Deal was heading out of town andLaBerge had not returned messages from the governors campaignlawyer.It was two years that this had been going on. And they were simplyurging the staff to proceed in a timely fashion rather than postpone itagain, Deal said.Neither Riley nor Teague responded to requests for on-the-recordcomment.


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This isnt the first time an issue has been raised regarding Riley,

Deals longtime aide. Congressional investigatorsin 2010 accusedDeal, who had recently resigned his U.S. House seat, of violatingethics rules by using his office to protect a lucrative state programthat earned his company big money.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that Riley used congressionalemail to contact state officials to discuss the plans and to setappointments for Deal to meet with them.2. Should LaBerge have turned over her memo earlier?If LaBerge was concerned about political pressure from thegovernors staff, as she now claims, she could have notified Olens or

even the U.S. attorney, who could have investigated them. Instead,she kept her concerns confined to a handful of commission membersand did not disclose them to the news media.LaBerge said she drafted the memoon July 17, 2012, after thecommissions chairman, Kevin Abernethy, suggested she write up hercontact with Teague and Riley.Nine days later, the AJC sent LaBerge a request under the stateOpen Records Act for access to and copies of all records, includinginterviews, audits, emails, faxes and any and all documents includingcase files related to two cases against Deal.

LaBerge released thousands of pages of documents, but not hermemo. Reporters from the AJC noticed some documents weremissing. It wasnt until after the AJC asked Olens to intervene thatLaBerge released thousands of additional pages. But again, thememo wasnt included.The memo should have been released in response to the submittedopen records request, said Hollie Manheimer, the executive directorof the Georgia First Amendment Foundation. Exceptions toGeorgias general rule of releasing public information are very, verynarrow, and none would have applied in response to this request.

Olens enforces the Open Records Act, and the AJC has had to go tohim on other occasions to get LaBerges agency to release publicdocuments. And when the AJC asked for the memo from LaBergelast week, she referred the request to her private lawyer, Lee Parks.LaBerge also kept the memo from Olens for about a year, dependingon whose version of events you believe. LaBerge said she gave thememo to Olens staff in June2013; Olens aides, however, said theydid not receive it until August or September 2013.The timing is critical. In June 2012, a month before LaBerge


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memorialized her contact with the governors staff, two former ethics

commission employees filed whistleblower lawsuits against the state,alleging that they were pushed out of the agency for attempting toinvestigate the campaign complaints against Deal.The lawsuits dragged on through months of motions and discovery.But LaBerges memo was not turned over to the two plaintiffs, formercommission director Stacey Kalberman and her top deputy, SherilynStreicker.3. What should Olens have done with the memo once he got it?From the beginning, Olens was in a tight spot. As attorney general hewas charged with enforcing open records laws. As the states top

lawyer, he was also responsible for defending LaBerge and thecommission against the whistleblower lawsuits.Olens says the memo did not meet the demands for documentsmade by the plaintiffs lawyers and did not have to be turned over.Specifically, Olens said it didnt meet Kalbermans request forcorrespondence or for Streickers demand for documentsconcerning the violation of any law, rule, or regulation.Many outside attorneys disagree.Bob Wilson, a former DeKalb County district attorney who hasserved as a special prosecutor for the state, said the fact that

LaBerges memo references text messages from Teague andRiley clearly meets the threshold of correspondence.Olens argument, Wilson said, will not hold water. It is ice thatwill not carry his weight. This document should have beenproduced.But Ben Easterlin, a partner at King & Spalding in Atlanta, saidOlens made the right decision.Considering the context and the timing of the request and thespecific wording of the request, I thought the memo would notbe responsive to any of the discovery documents that were

presented by the Kalberman and Streicker cases, Easterlinsaid.Although Olens determined the memo was not correspondence,LaBerge copied text messages from her phone and pasted them intothe document. Whether Olens or his staff asked LaBerge to producethose texts separately is unknown.Olens has said he cant discuss the situation further becauseLaBerge is technically still his client and she and her attorney haverefused to waive attorney-client privilege.


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Ultimately, the Attorney Generals Office gave the memo to the AJC

last week after it filed an Open Records Act request.4. Should Olens or other state officials have called for anindependent investigation, and should they do so now?Olens said he shared the memo with his chief prosecutor, whoconcluded that no state laws had been broken.State law allows the attorney general to designate a private lawyer asa special assistant attorney general to handle a specific case. Thishappens often with civil cases. Those lawyers, however, report to,and are paid by, the attorney general.Could any attorney Olens chooses, supervises and pays be

considered independent? Nothing in state law allows Olens to hand acase off to a local district attorney, for example, and unlike federallaw, there is no mechanism in state law for appointing a specialindependent prosecutor.There are, however, code sections in state law that allow thegovernor to appoint special prosecutors, as then-Gov. Sonny Perduedid when he hired Wilson and former Attorney General Mike Bowersto investigate the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal.In this situation, however, would Deal who steadfastly claims heand his office have done nothing wrong want an independent

investigation, and how could he ensure any investigator he namedwould be independent?Finally, state law allows the General Assembly to also conductinvestigations with the same power as the attorney general. The codesection, however, does not spell out how the Legislature woulddecide to do that, and lawmakers dont return to session untilJanuary.Whether or not a new investigation is launched, investigations arealready being conducted by the State Auditors Office, the stateInspector General and the FBI.

5. Who benefited from the memo staying hidden?The memos concealment may have prevented Deal and/or his staffmembers from having to testify in the whistleblower lawsuits,including one that ultimately went to trial earlier this year.The judge overseeing the case rejected a motion to have Deal or hisstaff testify in the cases. A crucial factor in the judges ruling was thatthe plaintiff had not demonstrated that the men engaged in any typeof coercion.Both former employees prevailed in their cases; Kalberman was


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Caldon Rule 60 Motion 24 July 2014

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Transcript of Caldon Rule 60 Motion 24 July 2014