The coverage in The Intercept and other news outlets about accusations of wrongdoing by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson is voluminous. These are very long stories. Headlines and summaries have focused on the accusation that Swanson pressured staffers to do campaign staff work in a government office, and punished those who refused.
But is that really the most surprising and shocking thing that’s being alleged?
I don’t want to make light of politicking on the government dime, and strong-arming employees to do so. That’s a big deal, particularly if done as forcefully and punitively as Swanson’s employees claim. If the accusations about Swanson pressuring employees to do campaign work are true, the state’s chief law enforcement officer broke the law.
Now, are those accusations true? I don’t know, but the fact that the documents show that Swanson ran statewide Attorney General and Governor campaigns with $0 in personnel costs indicates that there very well may have been substantial illegal government subsidization of Swanson’s political campaigns.
As significant as that is, there may be an even bigger scandal buried deep in those long stories. In the 32nd paragraph of The Intercept story was this little Nixonian nugget about an accusation by former Swanson employee D’Andre Norman.
Similarly, in one of the Star Tribune’s follow-up stories, under the headline “Lori Swanson hits back at former aide who says she politicized attorney general’s office,” this item was buried in the 26th paragraph, long after many readers stopped reading.
Wait, what? A guy who work worked at Lori Swanson’s side for years says he was wiretapping employees at Swanson’s behest, presumably so Swanson could retaliate against them? I’ll leave it to others to determine whether this kind of alleged spying on employees is illegal, but it certainly is, if true, supremely creepy and unethical.
Keep in mind, these employees weren’t accused of doing anything illegal. They were thought to be supporting an effort to unionize their workplace, which seems like something that a would-be standard bearer for the Democratic Farm Labor (DFL) Party should support.
If the spying and wiretapping accusations are true, that’s a seismic political event. And if the recent headlines had been more like “Accusation: Swanson ordered wiretapping of employees,” the pre-primary political damage done to Swanson might have been much worse.