Breaking News/12.02.2024
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Cover-up? State Treasurer Deborah Goldberg battles to bury records of her kangaroo court firing of top cannabis regulator
Shannon O’Brien, the now former Cannabis Control Commission chair, was ousted in September following flimsy allegations she had made racially insensitive remarks.
Behind those allegations, in turn, was a fellow CCC commissioner who had sought and failed to secure O’Brien’s job as chair of the cannabis regulator, long plagued by internal power struggles and dysfunction.
Oh yeah, and O’Brien, former head of the Boston-area Girl Scouts chapter, was also supposedly unfair to the CCC’s now former executive director, who just happened to be a former top aide to State Treasurer Deb Goldberg.
Now O’Brien, a long-time fixture of state Democratic politics who was the first woman nominated to run for governor by a major party, is forging ahead with a lawsuit in state court appealing her firing.
And Goldberg, the state treasurer, is doing her petty best to bury from public view the more than 1,700 pages of records from the closed-door hearings that led to O’Brien’s firing.
Hearings, mind you, that were roundly criticized by O’Brien’s lawyers as being grossly unfair and designed to come back with only one conclusion: you’re fired.
Lawyers for the state attorney general’s office, which is representing the treasurer, will appear in state court Tuesday morning.
Their goal? To stop the public release of the record of those closed-door hearings - documents that could very well prove highly embarrassing for Goldberg, who hired O’Brien to turn around the scandal-plagued Cannabis Control Commission, only to mysteriously turn on her.
Of course, that’s not the official reason that Goldberg and her legal team are giving.
The treasurer contends she will release an administrative record of the hearings at a later date, but that she must first tidy things up, redacting sensitive medical and personal information.
Ok. But there’s a big problem with that argument, and it’s this: Goldberg and her legal team, when pressed, have been unable to point to any specific cases of sensitive information in the records.
Also, the closed-door hearings that Goldberg used to trash O’Brien and provide window dressing for her decision to give her the boot concluded months ago.
The state treasurer has, at taxpayer expense, a team of outside lawyers, as well as legal help within her own department.
There has certainly been more than enough time - and lawyers - to redact any sensitive information, if that were truly an issue here, lawyers for O’Brien contend.
A hearing on whether to impound the records will be held Tuesday morning at Suffolk County Superior Court, so we’ll see what the judge rules.
Massachusetts already has a reputation as having one of the least transparent state governments in the country, with secrecy too often providing a cloak for the abuse of power and corruption.
And letting the state treasurer sit on those records and shield them from public view would be more of the same.
“It would prevent any realistic opportunity for Shannon O’Brien … to undo the devasting harm Goldberg has done to her good name,” lawyers for O’Brien contend in a legal filing.