In addition to the political pressure Howard Dean is facing regarding the 10-year seal placed on his gubernatorial records, Dean also has to deal with a lawsuit.<\/p>\n
As expected, a conservative legal group called Judicial Watch, best known for filing almost-daily lawsuits against the Clinton administration a few years ago, followed through on earlier threats and sued Dean yesterday<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Dean’s political ambition, rather than any legitimate concern about protecting the deliberative or policymaking process, was the driving force behind efforts to withhold large portions of the governor’s papers from public scrutiny,” Judicial Watch alleged in its lawsuit. (It probably won’t help Dean that he practically admitted that this is true, telling Vermont Public Radio that he negotiated the seal on his records because “we didn’t want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time.”)<\/p>\n A report in the Burlington Free Press<\/a> also reported that internal memos released by Vermont’s Secretary of State’s office show that Dean initially sought to have certain records sealed for 24 years, instead of the 10-year seal he eventually agreed to. <\/p>\n Those same memos, the Free Press said, “indicate there was discussion about how to avoid having a political rival use information from the records in an attack ad against Dean during some future political endeavor.” Suggesting that he could undo the 10-year seal, Dean said<\/a>, “I’ll unseal mine if he’ll unseal all of his.”<\/p>\n
\n
\nThere’s one other point about this flap that I can’t figure out. Dean said on Monday that Bush had done the same thing by locking his gubernatorial records up at his father’s presidential library.<\/p>\n