Book Proposal On Toledo 'Blade' Coingate Coverage Lands in Court

By: Joe Strupp The coverage of Ohio's 'Coingate' scandal by the Blade of Toledo, which has already resulted in a Pulitzer finalist honor and the firing of a Blade reporter who sought to derail it, took another turn Tuesday as a book proposal on the coverage landed in court.

During a hearing in the Lucas County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas, two would-be authors, Joe Kidd and Jon Stainbrook, sought to stop a local alternative weekly from publishing excerpts of a book proposal the pair had written, according to a story on the Web site of WTOL-TV. Kidd, the former director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, and Stainbrook, a longtime Republican activist, claimed that the publication of the excerpts by the Toledo Free Press would reduce the value of their eventual book.

The book proposal reportedly details the authors' involvement in the Blade's reporting of the 'Coingate' scandal, which the daily paper broke last year. It also alleges that Kidd met with former Blade political reporter Fritz Wenzel as early as January 2004 and discussed with him allegations of illegal campaign contributions from local GOP activist Tom Noe to the Bush re-election campaign, but did not report them.

Noe eventually became the focus of the 2005 'Coingate' series, in which the Blade uncovered revelations that Noe had lost tens of millions of dollars in state funds through a rare coin investment scheme. Soon after, Noe was accused, and later charged, with making illegal campaign contributions to Bush's 2004 campaign.

Speculation that Wenzel had known about Noe's involvement in the 'Coingate' scheme and the illegal campaign contributions as early as 2004 have been raised for more than a year but no proof has ever been found that he sat on either story, despite his well-known ties to Noe and his family. Wenzel has since left the paper.

George Tanber, a former Blade reporter, raised the accusations again in March when he wrote an anonymous letter to the Pulitzer Prize board alleging that the 'Coingate' story had been delayed in 2004 in an effort to keep it quiet until after the 2004 presidential election in which Ohio's electoral votes were a deciding factor. Blade editors have said they had heard rumors of the Noe-related stories in 2004, but could not nail down enough facts to publish at the time.

Several weeks ago, Tanber disclosed his authorship of the Pulitzer letter after the Blade launched an investigation into the letter that included the hiring of two private investigators. He was later fired.