Escambia County Commissioner Jeff Bergosh discusses last week’s show cause hearing concerning his text messages that were stolen off the county’s server, gives the last information on bids for OLF-8, and shares his views about the recent complaints about the county’s Emergency Medical Services.
Text Messages: “We believe a crime is being committed right now with multiple individuals holding these records. Remember Rick, this is not just about Jeff Bergosh. This is about a lot of citizens in the county who confided with personal medical information. It’s about my kids, unrelated to my job. They’re not affiliated with the county…I mean these are things that they’re nobody’s business.”
OLF 8: “The wild card is there’s a third group, Rick, and I’m not at liberty to name them yet, but I met with them one week ago today. They’re red hot interested in this property. They’ve got a nice, very well-experienced team put together, and I anticipate at some point today they will be tendering an offer for OLF 8.”
EMS: “I think we have a rockstar named David Torsell running that outfit. I’ve watched him work. He’s done great work with the core program. He’s intense, he’s focused.”
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On the stolen texts, there’s a bunch of commentary over on Commissioner Bergosh’s blog, which you linked to on a previous post. I’d like to pull out my commentary there on the PNJ’s place in this suit to share it here. I’m squarely in the corner of splitting the baby fairly on that one:
“If the County is ruled to have standing, the PNJ–alone–seems to me to have every right to retain the property, and if I’m going to be painfully honest about it, I have to hope they are allowed to do so. Freedom of the press is far more important than the sum total of the private messages on the phone, as horrible as the theft was. And this is hardly the Pentagon Papers. I will fall off my chair if the judge doesn’t rule for the PNJ, but then I don’t know anything about him or his politics and principles. I’m sure there are a handful of judges out there that would side with republicans trying to rip down freedom of the press and speech in Tallahassee with their wretched defamation bill, as well, and lord knows Clarence Thomas would love to get his hands on an attempt to shut the press up about him. As much as I thought Jim’s handling of the texts was trashy, and beneath him (whom I believe in general to be a pretty fair guy the last few years of his reporting, and imagine was under pressure from upstairs to produce), I don’t believe the PNJ broke any laws in publishing anything they’ve published. Just because I can’t stand the bias and dishonesty of many writers past and present, and I loathe Gannett allowing a media source to become a puppet for boutique development interest, doesn’t mean I want to see the Fourth Estate punished in place of whoever stole the texts and passed them to Johnny Boy. At first it seemed common sense that they shouldn’t have stolen material. But it didn’t take more than an hour of Googling to be reminded of all the precedent for them being allowed to have it, and why it’s so important that they can. I guess if there’s some legal way to split the baby and have them turn back over the sensitive security information, that would seem like a fair outcome, but I doubt an HOA gate is going to out-sensitize the Pentagon safes.”
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=1317770170474039861&postID=29599070640095813
Also–and I’m pulling from memory–I didn’t read it (or maybe don’t remember it) as Arduini going against his lawyer’s advice on testifying, but am thinking his lawyer changed his stance on that when he was reminded by Stephen West that if a defendant pleads the 5th in a replevin, he loses any argument on keeping whatever contested property he might have. Of course we can’t know, but the direction did seem to have changed from “clam up” to “talk” over the break directly preceding Arduini’s preening testimony. I wondered watching it if his attorney wished that he’d shut up after all, just as I wondered if he really understands who he has taken on as a client (or cares). Arduini has been involved in trafficking stolen sensitive County information before, and publicly wisecracked about Commissioner Barry’s stolen info at the time he released a document that did not look to have been redacted by the County before his possession of it.
Rick, to your question of whether there was some public record that Commissioner Bergosh didn’t fulfill, Arduini has been playing games for a long time with the public records process at the county, submitting a large request and then going quiet when he gets the bill for it, then pretending he never got the communication, etc, taking it back up again to keep the request open. He’s got one request that the last I requested the record he had opened back up a request the end of last year that he had previously failed to respond to communication on.
Just the typical lion-rabbit bread crumb games masquerading as revolutionary fReEdUmB activism that we’ve all seen now a thousand times before. In my opinion, of course.