As I conceded above, I don’t have any answer to this. I thought the demand letter would lay out the evidence, but it only specified the allegation.
So to the extent that he is, in fact, relying on some evidence in initiating this investigation, I’m not aware of what it is…
Is there something in Cooch’s past, something I’ve missed (outside of the (R) behind his name) that would lead you to have concluded:
With my history, my automatic response to prosecutorial issues is to, like you, assume that the AG has some kind of actual evidence and that he is looking for an actual crime. But given Cooch’s track record of using his office for political gain, given his statements about the investigation turned solely on the “climategate”, and given the other investigations into Mann, I think the evidence is squarely on the side of “Cooch is misusing his office for party political reasons”.
The evidence, to me, shows that Cooch is simply a huge fishing expedition, unsupported by anything but talking point supposition.
But you’re a wagering man. How about this:
If UVA gives these items over to Cooch, I guarantee you some of those materieals will somehow make their way into the hands of Newsmax/Breitbart/FoxNews and the entire investigation will never, ever result in criminal charges being brought.
The fact that he’s the freakin’ Attorney General.
And, also, that he’s not an idiot. He must know that his request won’t be greeted by equanimity from his targets. Simple self-preservation supports the inference that he has something to point to that will allow him to claim, however implausibly, that he was relying on it in initiating the investigation.
I agree. But I’m reasonably certain he has some de minimis irregularity to point to. Something that, in ordinary circumstances, would never be the basis for action.
In other words, “Cuccinelli has some piece of evidence,” and “Cuccinelli is misuing his office to score political points,” are not mutually exclusive. He probably has something, some fig leaf’s worth, of evidence AND he is nonetheless misusing his office.
That’s possible too. But the reason I think it’s unlikely, again, is simple self-preservation instinct. Surely he knows that people will look for a way to discredit this action; surely he knows it would be prudent to have something he can point to.
No bet.
As I said, that gets him an original presumption, one that has been rebutted by the evidence.
Objection! Arguing facts not in evidence.
Not only have I not seen anything, I can’t imagine what it would be. The only thing Cooch himself has said about it is in reference to “climategate”. Now I would submit that that, in and of itself, is the only thing he has, and that it doesn’t even meet the standard of “de minimis”. But I think he thinks it does.
Fair enough.
“Climategate” is what he has, and is my guess what he will continue, to point to as the reason. Do you think that is sufficient, because I certainly don’t. And I think you are seriously underestimating his fervent desire to push his political agenda.
Darn.
In other news, UVA’s Executive Council of the Faculty Senate has responded:
And it doesn’t even have to rise to the level of implausibility.
Remember AG Jim Garrison and the JFK Murder Conspiracy Plot? All he needed was a wildly improbable tale backed up by a paranoid, a drug addict and a bunch of recovered memories and hey presto!, he was all over the national media.
I can’t say I’ve immersed myself in “Climategate,” but so far as I’m aware, the only smoking gun that the Climategate e-mails revealed were the pressure placed by prominent warmers against publishing skeptics’ attempts at refutation. This seems to run counter to the concept of peer review. The other seemingly significant items – “Mike’s nature trick” etc., were, as I recall, shown to be shorthand discussions for perfectly acceptable procedures.
I cannot fathom how that would relate to a case of fraud in applying for a Virginia grant, but again, I can’t claim a thorough knowledge of the subject.
District Attorney, not Attorney General – but yes, good parallel.
We need a fact that is 1)confirmed by the record and 2)relevant to the question. Each of these meets one of those criteria, but not the other.
By this reasoning, for example, George Rekers must have somthing to point to that will allow him to claim, however implausibly, that he did in fact hire a luggage porter (not a gay escort) from rentboy.com.
Confidence in the goddam Batman, er, freakin’ Attorney General only goes so far, I see.
Sure. Twin beds. 
But the bet diverged from the discussion. Even if Cuccinelli has an affidavit from Mann’s assistant swearing that Mann got temperature numbers by throwing darts at a number chart, he could STILL leak the info to Breitbart and still conclude that a criminal prosecution couldn’t succeed.
I can’t either, so we agree on that. I don’t think Cooch does, though.
Here is an interview the Cooch did on Wednesday. In it, he says: “There’s a half million dollars that went into some of these grants and the publicly available information at least leads us to say or ask if these grants were used for what they were requested for.”
His reference to “publically available information”, and his earlier reference to climategate, leads me to conclude that that is the extent of his evidence to support the investigation. I don’t believe there is some secret information that Cooch knows, but isn’t telling anyone, that indicates Mann committed fraud. If there is, maybe it is sufficient to warrant an investigation. But given Cooch’s track record, his comments so far, and his demand itself, I’m not seeing it. What I am seeing is a man using his position as AG to further his political agenda without regard to evidence.
If this is what this jerk is using as evidence for fraud then every single scientist who ever won a grant in Virginia is now in jeopardy. When I initially read this thread, I suspected there were two ways a grant application could be used to make an attempt at demonstrating fraud (or at least what my layman’s understanding of fraud is): 1) the very common occurance of the grant’s money outliving the direction of the science in the application, so that much of the published research does not perfectly resemble the application, or 2) the preliminary data, which is not always ideal research, would somehow be used to implicate him in fraud. Either way, it wouldn’t be very healthy for scientific inquiry to prosecute this.
To begin with, it was pointed before that that was not even a smoking gun, it remains an allegation with very little support.
Also calling the scientists “warmers” betrays where are you coming from, suffice to say is that your sources continue to deceive you.
Deniers are indeed like Cuccinelli, there are skeptics that do publish in peer review publications but remain a minority, we have believers (warmists) like Al Gore that do not publish in peer review publications, and then we have the vast majority of scientists that are proponents of AGW.
There is very little to support the charges that scientists prevented publications of skeptical papers just because they were contrarian to the current consensus, the reality is that scientists were just doing their jobs as reviewers, they only made efforts to prevent papers with clumsy mistakes to be published.
It happens that I became a climate change buff thanks to the clear stupidity of deniers having a beef with the climate reconstructions of the past, it is an item that deniers can easily twist to confuse people. Scientists and academics however know the history of the reconstructions and would be laughing at the misrepresentations if idiot politicians would only look at the evidence before jumping at conspiracy theories.
"“The revelations of Climate-gate indicate that some climate data may have been deliberately manipulated to arrive at pre-set conclusions,” said Brian Gottstein, director of communication for the attorney general’s office. “The use of manipulated data to apply for taxpayer-funded research grants in Virginia is potentially fraud. Given this, the only prudent thing to do was to look into it.”
So, in light of what we’ve learned so far, are you still advocating the still unknown “dick covering fig leaf” theory Bricker? Can we agree that the basis for this “investigation” (I’d use the term witchhunt, though) is nothing but ill-informed right wing talking points? Are you willing to join us in condemning this idiotic, politically motivated fishing expedition?
I was thinking the same thing. In fact, your #1 scenario pretty much happens in all funded research unless you’re a shitty scientist. The #2 scenario also happens a lot because the preliminary data was, well, preliminary. Let’s say Mann started using a certain model for a smaller subset of data that wasn’t holding up when he started applying it to a larger set of data. Is it fraud when he switches models and those are the ones he publishes with?
As far as the climategate, there was one part that even other scientists criticized Mann and others for ethical but bullyish behavior. An editor to a journal did a crappy job and allowed a sub-par “skeptic” article in. Then he refused to retract the paper so many others on the editorial board quit in disgust. When Mann, the English guy (can’t remember his name) and others got wind of this, they all conspired to no longer send their work to that journal. Scientists like to gossip about what journals they think are worthy or not. What’s atypical is a group of scientists who get together to boycott a journal. Perfectly ethincal but, well, just plain mean.
Another part that approaches a real -gate of ‘climategate’ was the stalling on the FOIA requests. However, it’s also clear that these FOIA requests were getting to be shear harrassment of the scientists to the point that they were having to put too much time and effort. Many times the FOIAs would simply be repeats of earlier FOIAs. So, it was kind of understandable, especially since scientists don’t have the resources to constantly provide for FOIA requests (which was the goal of the constant barrage of requests in the first place).
Didn’t I already condemn it, at least implicitly?
But, yeah, I’d say that latest quote from the horse’s mouthpiece swings the scales to tip the other way: I’d say now that it’s less likely he’s got even a fig leaf.
Forty requests in two days, I’m told. It’s Science v. 4Chan, really.
From the same person?
I don’t think so, but it’d be hard to believe the people making the requests were not in cahoots.
Not the same person, but clearly many of those requests came thanks to the efforts made by climate denier blogs.
Indeed, the state of affairs before the “climategate” email scandal came up, was that the government outfits in charge of approving FOI requests (from England and the USA) were agreeing with the position of climate scientists: most of the requests should be denied, whoever stole the emails did so to get around that frustrating limitation.
The effort was to derail and harass scientists, as that effort is falling on its face anti-scientists with access to power like Cuccinelli are going for plan B.
A little update on our favorite Attorney General.
A federal judge has ruled that, while Cooch has the power to investigate fraud in university grants, in this case Cooch’s subpoena “subpoena failed to state a “reason to believe” that Mann had committed fraud.”
The ruling stated: “The Court has read with care those pages and understands the controversy regarding Dr. Mann’s work on the issue of global warming. However, it is not clear what he did was misleading, false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
Lest we come to the conclusion that Cuccinelli takes a judical rebuke seriously, he has since refiled a new subpoena. After the judge threw out his demands on 4 out of 5 of the grants, Cooch filed another CID (civil investigative demand) last week.
According to Mann (the subject of this little partisan witch hunt), the grant that Cooch is demanding his research on was about ““natural land-vegetation-atmosphere interaction in the African savanna” and had fuckall (official term) to do with Mann’s climate change research. Yet, despite that, Coochie wants to references Mann’s prior work (of which, once again, Mann has been cleared of any fraudulent activity).
UVA is consulting their lawyers about the latest request.
Simply more of a witchhunt by a partisan hack abusing his powers to score political points. You lucky Virginians you.