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A Jefferson County Judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by state Senator Joe Scarnati's campaign against a reporter from Spotlight PA as well as The Caucus, a publication of LNP Media Group, and one of its journalists.
Scarnati's campaign wanted the news organizations and individuals to pay a total of $6,070 -- $5,070 for producing and copying public records which documented questionable campaign spending by Scarnati and $1,000 in attorneys' fees and court costs.
The case decided Wednesday involved the DuBois accounting firm Clyde, Ferraro & Co., which was hired in 2006 to keep the Scarnati campaign's books and to maintain public records that state law requires campaigns to maintain, Spotlight PA reported.
The journalists requested those records -- receipts of payments made by the campaign -- as part of a year-long investigation into how Scarnati and other lawmakers obscure their spending, they continue.
Spotlight PA provided the following summary of the investigation:
"The investigation by The Caucus and Spotlight PA found that from 2016 through 2018, the campaigns of Scarnati and other lawmakers spent $3.5 million that could not be fully traced based on the information they disclosed on regular campaign finance reports. Scarnati's campaign accounted for almost $246,000 of that, more than any of the nearly 300 campaigns the journalists examined.
The records at issue showed Scarnati's campaign used donors' money to pay for, among other things, thousands of dollars in hotel rooms and dinners during a 2016 trip through Europe. On regular campaign finance reports, however, these expenses were often listed as simply "travel" or "lodging" without disclosing where the money was spent.
Hours after The Caucus and Spotlight PA published the original investigation, lawmakers attempted to change the law to make it harder for the public to access the records the news organizations relied upon.
That effort failed, but a refiled lawsuit might achieve the same goal through the courts if it succeeds, media experts said."
"The lawsuit, which Scarnati's campaign could attempt to refile, could pose a chilling effect on journalists' and the public's access to public records. If successful, it could make it easier for public officials to charge excessive fees to news organizations, their staff, and the public, and lead to potentially large court costs if defendants contested the fees in litigation," Spotlight PA said.
"This ruling is a victory for the citizens of Pennsylvania," Tom Murse, editor of The Caucus and executive editor of LNP | LancasterOnline, told Spotlight PA. "Allowing our government representatives to charge thousands of dollars for documents that are required by Pennsylvania's campaign finance law to be readily available for inspection would have made those documents prohibitively expensive and represented a significant blow to transparency."