By: Joe Strupp David Nitkin, blogging at The Baltimore Sun's Maryland Politics site, raised the question of why The Washington Post broke a story on a federal investigation into new GOP chairman Michael Steele's failed 2006 Maryland senate campaign, then redacted elements of a document it posted from the probe.
"The document was prepared by lawyers for Alan B. Fabian, who had been Steele?s Senate campaign finance chairman, as Fabian sought a reduced sentence after pleading guilty to unrelated fraud charges," Nitkin, the Sun's politics editor, wrote. "It was intended to show, in part, that Fabian was willing to cooperate in other inquiries, and had knowledge of alleged wrongdoing that he believed was valuable. The Post reported that the judge did not give Fabian credit for agreeing to participate in any investigation that involved Steele. Fabian was sentenced to a nine-year term.
"The Post said it was given the confidential document by federal officials after it requested a different one. The newspaper posted what it is calling 'excerpts' of the document online.
"But the online version has been electronically redacted. The Post has made available two pages of a document that appears to be more than 30 pages long."
Calls to Post editors were not immediately returned Thursday.
Nitkin goes on to ask in the posting:
a) Who did the redacting? If it was the U.S. Attorney?s Office, that raises serious doubts about whether the disclosure was ?accidental.? If the feds wrongly included the document in response to a records request in error, one would imagine they would have given the whole thing.
b) Did the newspaper itself do the redacting? That?s hard to believe. The Post wants more information out there, not less. But if the paper redacted, it raises the possibility that newspaper managers and the U.S. Attorney?s Office had some kind of negotiations about what could be published, and what couldn?t.
c) What else does the document contain? If Fabian wanted to cut a deal, what other information did he provide?
See his posting, with a link to the Post documents, at:
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/local/politics/2009
/02/steele_federal_inquiry.html
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