I have covered the ongoing back and forth between the University of Virginia and VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, as the latter tries to obtain Michael Mann's emails to further the investigation into grant applications made by the hockey stick maestro.
I'm slightly confused by all this toing and froing. Last I heard, Cuccinelli had applied for the release of the emails once again - this was back at the end of September - with the university applying to have the demand set aside in mid-October.
It looks to me as if the university's application was successful, because just before Christmas it was reported that Cuccinelli had appealed a court ruling turning down his demand. However, the Virginia Qui Tam Law blog, from whom I have obtained this news, says that there is a strong case that the judge has erred.
...it seems to me that the AG is correct, and the Circuit Court erred in a number of ways, not the least of which was in ruling that Cuccinelli needed a "reason to believe" that there had been a violation of the VFATA.
On that issue, the Circuit Court clearly went against more than a century of very clear federal and state case law when it quashed the Civil Investigative Demand. The Circuit Court applied a standard somewhere in between a subpoena and a document request in civil discovery—that is to say, it applied a "judicial standard" to the CID rather a "law enforcement standard."
It is apparently also likely that even if this appeal fails, Cuccinelli will still get what he is after.
The appeal document can be seen here. This contains the interesting information that the university had previously told a Virginia congressman, Bob Marshall, who asked for the same emails under FOIA legislation, that it no longer held Mann's emails. However, in response to Cuccinelli's requests they had subsequently revealed that an email server containing this correspondence had been located. The Virginia legislature is now considering a bill that would allow termination of the contracts of public employees who breached FOIA legislation. A fuller account of this story is here.
The appeal also contains this snippet about post-normal science:
Academics are free to follow any philosophy of science they wish. Nonetheless, Post Normal Science has produced jargon which might be misleading/fraudulent in the context of a grant application if its specialized meaning is not disclosed or otherwise known to the grant maker.