Drip, Drip, Drip: Six Agencies Illegally Scoured Joe the Plumber's Records for Dirt, Including Office of the Attorney General, So That Information Could Be Turned Over to National Media

Wow! That "Sudden Fame Exception" to privacy wasn't known by many, but it sure seems to have been known by partisan Democratic Ohio bureaucrats!

Ohio Inspector General Tom Charles said his office is now looking at a half-dozen agencies that accessed state records on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.

The Beacon Journal has learned that, in addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, two other state offices — the Ohio Department of Taxation and Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers — conducted database searches of Joe the Plumber.

..

The [day after the third presidential debate], the taxation department conducted two separate searches of a database of liens for unpaid taxes that were certified to the Ohio Attorney General's Office for collection.

John Kohlstrand, a taxation department spokesman, said he is prohibited from talking about individual taxpayers, but he confirmed that the databases were checked.

...

Kohlstrand said that the AG's office wanted access to the records so they could turn over to the national media lien information that was a public record in Lucas County. He said the national media did not have reporters in Toledo, so the attorney general's office was helping them out with public records.

On the day following the two searches, the taxation department conducted a search of another in-house database that tracks cases and correspondence between taxpayers and the department before the liens being certified and turned over to the attorney general for collection.

Check out this spin: The claim is they wanted to ensure the media wasn't misreporting information about JtP's infamous thousand-dollar tax lien:

Anthony said the database searches on both days were conducted to ensure that the information in Lucas County was being properly reported by the media.

''Wouldn't that have been a disaster if the lien had been paid,'' Kohlstrand said. ''The responsible thing for us to do would be to take prompt steps to make it right.''

God Bless You for your service.

''We are not aware of any inappropriate browsing of information by anyone in our department pertaining to Mr. Wurzelbacher,'' Kohlstrand said.

Of course not. Thus the criminals abandon the "Sudden Fame Exception" to privacy laws, and offer a new rational: the "Searching Through Someone's Records to Make Sure He's Not Being Libeled by the Media Exception."

Um, couldn't Joe have requested such a service himself? And doesn't the law specify he's required to actually request that, before government snoops go digging through his files and sending them to the media?

They were protecting Joe from the media, you see. By passing them the fruits of illegal private-records searches.

To ensure he wasn't being maligned.

By confirming their previous smears on him.

Big Brother

...is watching you watching out for you.

Are you not comforted?

Thanks to TopSecretK9.

Six Agencies Illegally Scoured Joe the Plumber's Records for Dirt, Including Office of the Attorney General, So That Information Could Be Turned Over to National Media&bodytext=Wow! That "Sudden Fame Exception" to privacy wasn't known by many, but it sure seems to have been known by partisan Democratic Ohio bureaucrats! Ohio Inspector General Tom Charles said his office is now looking at a half-dozen agencies that...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 03:44 PM

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