State Attorney General TJ Donovan said this week that it would be an abuse of power to investigate an attorney’s claim that a state official was arrested for sex with a minor while on official business, without further facts or evidence.
More than two weeks ago, attorney Russell Barr made the salacious allegation that an official on state business for the EB-5 program, seeking to recruit investors for Jay Peak, had sex with a minor in China.
Barr, the founder of Barr Law Group in Stowe, made the charge to reporters outside the Lamoille County Courthouse in Hyde Park on March 19. Barr refused to name the official or provide details to support the allegation and told the press he would submit evidence to the court two weeks from that date.
At the time, Barr said he had “solid information” about an official from the Vermont EB-5 Regional Center who was arrested for a crime in 2013 or 2014 “and then it was apparently covered up.”
Barr said he would include that information in a filing on Monday. He didn’t. In a statement, Barr said that his law firm takes the allegations seriously and fully expects “that the proper authorities will complete a meaningful investigation.”
But for the time being, a state probe looks unlikely, unless Barr comes up with the evidence.
“An allegation was made, we were told evidence would be presented and so I’m not sure it exists,” Donovan said Tuesday when asked about the allegations.
“We’re going to move on from this and focus on doing our job,” he said.
Without more evidence supporting the accusations, Donovan said it would be an abuse of power to open an investigation and start interviewing people about the supposed arrest.
“You need credible evidence, something that can be corroborated. You need a witness. You need facts. You don’t investigate rumors,” the attorney general said.
“To choose not to investigate a rumor is not a cover-up, it is sound public policy and a reasonable exercise of our discretion as law enforcement officers,” he said.
“The most important quality of a prosecutor is restraint, and the exercise of restraint, and that you don’t go down the rabbit hole of rumor and innuendo, and you look at the facts and the evidence, and there’s an absence of both in this case, in this particular allegation,” Donovan said.
Barr said the alleged arrest in China was a microcosm of the state’s role in the Jay Peak fraud. He blamed the state for blocking his attempts for formal discovery, including attempts to subpoena key witnesses and gain access to relevant documents.
“For years, we have requested a meaningful investigation of the state’s role in recruiting EB-5 investors into a fraud, and for years, we and anyone else who has asked has been told ‘no,’” Barr wrote.
Barr said his focus was on determining who was spending the money stolen from investors, how it was accounted for, and whether it was “systematically misused with full knowledge and participation of the states’ EB-5 employees?”
“From that perspective, as we have stated from the beginning, these trips and what transpired on them is ultimately important,” Barr said. “It is more than sad irony that fraudulently obtained investor money was used to fuel marketing trips that served as sordid junkets for the supposed state auditors. It is untenable that the activities on these junkets have been systematically covered up by individuals in our state government.”
Gov. Phil Scott and Donovan have both called on Barr to immediately surrender any evidence of the alleged crime to the state.
Since Barr made his allegation, the Vermont Department of Public Safety released a statement saying that an internal investigation conducted in 2014 turned nothing up. That probe was in response to a complaint filed by Brady Toensing, vice chair of the Vermont Republican Party, who said it was “believed” that an arrest occurred on a trip in September 2013.
Scott said that apart from that probe, he had no plans of further investigations. “I don’t know what we would be searching for, nothing was turned up in our internal investigation. Barring Mr. Barr providing any details I’m just not sure what we would be looking for,” he said.
Toensing has said that his complaint was meant to be a more general request for the state to investigate the claims, rather than leading to a narrow review of single trip. “Were employees who went on other overseas trips interviewed? Were witnesses asked about other trips? Was Governor Shumlin interviewed? If not, then why not?” he asked last month.
Donovan says his predecessor, Bill Sorrell, did not investigate when these questions were raised in 2014 about an arrest overseas. The AG said he can’t interview former Vermont EB-5 Regional Center officials about the allegation without evidence that it is true.
The rumors about an alleged arrest for a sex crime in China are not new. In fact, they have swirled in political circles for years. Yet no public statement had been made about the alleged incident until Barr publicly aired claims about the alleged arrest last month.
Eight officials at the commerce agency were part of an email chain about Toensing’s August 2014 public records request for any information about an arrest in China, though the suspected reason for that arrest was not made explicit.
Later that year, Scott Milne, the GOP candidate for governor against incumbent Gov. Peter Shumlin, was told about the allegations. Based on that information, Milne said in a recent interview that he felt justified in criticizing the “mismanagement” of the commerce agency, which oversaw the state’s EB-5 program. His campaign did not pay for opposition research on the subject, he said.
“We criticized Peter Shumlin and how he mismanaged the Agency of Commerce and Community Development,” Milne said. “To me that [the alleged sex crime] is a sign of mismanagement of the department.”
Milne recalled that he took aim at Patricia Moulton, who was secretary of the agency at the time. Moulton is now the president of Vermont Technical College. “She at least had to have heard something about it,” Milne said.
Moulton declined to comment.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont AG to ‘move on’ after lawyer empty-handed on child sex claims.