In her ongoing fight to audit the Massachusetts Legislature, state Auditor Diana DiZoglio took the unusual step of waiving attorney-client privilege and releasing approximately 150 pages of documents that include exchanges between her office and the office of Attorney General Andrea Campbell.
As the Massachusetts House and Senate have resisted audit efforts, DiZoglio has repeatedly turned to the attorney general’s office, urging Campbell to compel the chambers to comply. The auditor and her staff have tried to convince Campbell that she should represent the auditor’s office in court, or appoint a special attorney general for that purpose if Campbell refuses to act as DiZoglio’s attorney.
The Massachusetts House and Senate have repeatedly questioned DiZoglio’s right to conduct such an audit and suggested that her attempt may be unconstitutional, despite a ballot question — that is now state law — that explicitly gives the auditor that authority and passed with support from 72% of the state’s voters last fall.
As DiZoglio tells it, she and her staff have been highly responsive to requests for information from the attorney general’s office. Campbell has publicly repeatedly claimed that the auditor’s office has not provided enough responses to their questions.
“We have repeatedly answered questions,” DiZoglio told GBH News Friday. “We have been engaging with the Office of the Attorney General in the hopes that they would have, by this point, agreed to represent the people on this matter, and enforce the law, by requiring that the legislature produce ... very basic financial documents and state contracts that are a matter of public record for essentially every state entity who doesn’t exempt themselves from public records laws like the Legislature is able to.
”We have been met instead with only identified potential challenges and issues by the attorney general’s office, instead of an agreement to fully represent us on this matter,“ DiZoglio added.
Her decision to release this correspondence, she says, is driven by a desire to prove that. She vowed to release the correspondence on GBH’s Boston Public Radio Wednesday.
Campbell has previously said on Boston Public Radio that she personally voted for the ballot question that explicitly gave DiZoglio audit power over the Legislature. However, Campbell also raised questions about the constitutionality of the measure before voters overwhelmingly backed it last year.
In a statement to GBH News after DiZoglio released the correspondence Friday, Campbell said the exchanges made public by DiZoglio paint a radically different picture than what DiZoglio believes.
”This correspondence demonstrates the Auditor’s failure to provide our office with the information needed to evaluate the viability of a lawsuit against the Legislature, including her legal argument and claims, despite our multiple and responsible requests,“ Campbell said.
”The intention of our questions is to anticipate what a judge will ask in court,“ Campbell added. ”There is a difference between a political argument and a legal claim, and we urge the Auditor to focus on the latter if her goal is to litigate this issue.“
Read the documents released by Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s office here:
