Category Archives: Sunshine

Oregon’s Attorney General offers an online “reading room” for documents in key federal case

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While looking online for a copy of the court order posted here yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to find a “Public Records Reading Room” created and supported by Oregon’s Office of the Attorney General.

Like Hawaii, Oregon has joined in various lawsuits challenging policies of the Trump Administration that affects the state’s residents.

One of those cases, in which Oregon joined California in challenging the deployment of national guard troops to its cities, has drawn widespread public and media interest. The online reading room is Oregon’s response.

Oregon Department of Justice has received requests under the Oregon Public Records Law for exhibits in State of Oregon, et al. v. Trump, et al., No. 3:25-cv-01756-IM (D. Or.). To facilitate access to these records, Oregon DOJ will post to this website exhibits that are not exempt from disclosure (due to the Court’s orders requiring confidentiality of certain documents) on a rolling basis.

Arranged for easy public access are more than 13 gigabytes of court records in the case, including trial exhibits introduced by the states of Oregon and California, along with the City of Portland and the federal government. There are also more than 2.4 GB of videos introduced as exhibits by ICE, and redacted versions of our depositions filed in the case.

These can be downloaded in bulk via zip files, or by clicking the links for individual files in each category, which are then listed out to allow downloads of individual files of interest.

These exhibits would normally go unseen by the public, and are not typcally included in the federal court’s PACER public document retrieval system. And they’re made available here free of charge.

As a reporter, I try as much as possible to get back to source documents so that I’m not reliant on someone else’s interpretation of events. This kind of document collection is priceless.

For example, here’s a list of the first 50 State of Oregon trial exhibits (out of 91 total).

Screenshot

It’s quite a public service. Hawaii’s Attorney General might consider following suit with key documents from its federal litigation with the Trump administration.

Prior Hawai “gag orders” have been struck down as unconstitutional

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The past week, the Maui County Board of Ethics adopted a set of new rules, but quickly put one of them on hold pending further consideration after it was criticized as a “gag order.”

Civil Beat reported:

That provision bound the complainant to a confidentiality requirement forbidding that person or citizens group from disclosing the pending complaint’s existence or sharing details of it publicly. If the ethics board or staff found that confidentiality was violated, they could use that as grounds to dismiss the complaint without further investigation.

This isn’t the first time such a confidentiality clause has been at issue in Hawaii. Both the State Ethics Commission and the Campaign Spending Commission had the same kind of confidential clause written into law, rather than just as a rule. And violation of those laws carried potential criminal penalties.

Both were successfully challenged in federal court and found to be unconstitutional.
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Clergy members describe assaults by ICE agents at Illinois facility

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We were singing old protest hymns like “We shall not be moved.” We eventually changed it to “Even if they tear gas us, we shall not be moved.” We also sang “We shall not be moved,” in Spanish. This song is about standing up for justice in a metaphorical sense. We were not literally blocking anything and no one ever asked us to move. Nonetheless, we were continuously tear-gassed and had pepper balls launched at us.
The Rev. Dr. Beth Johnson
Minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Hinsdale

Federal court records provide a continuing flow of first-hand unfiltered information about the attacks on First Amendment rights by ICE agents. The documents below were filed in against the federal government by a group of reporters, journalism organization, and other who say they witnessed numerous incidents of escalating violence by federal agents in response to demonstrations outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois, twelve miles from downtown Chicago.

According to Politico:

The plaintiffs are urging the court to protect the First Amendment rights of protesters to peacefully demonstrate around the facility and of journalists to “observe, record, and report on the federal agents’ activities and the public’s demonstrations against them.”

The suit — which was filed by the newsroom Block Club Chicago, the Chicago Headline Club, local labor unions representing Chicago-area journalists and a group of individual journalist and protesters — lists specific incidents in which they say agents targeted the press, including instances where they allege six journalists were hit with either pepper balls or tear gas despite wearing visible press credentials.

They also list eight examples of protesters and residents who they said were harmed or injured by ICE officers’ “violent presence” — including a minister for a local Presbyterian Church who allegedly was struck by the pepper balls and sprayed with tear gas while trying to offer prayers to the crowd.

The 52-page complaint can be read for free online.

Among the exhibits filed in court are several declarations by members of the clergy representing different religious denominations which describe what they witnesses and, in some cases, assaults they suffered at the hands of armed federal agents.

I’ve combined several of these, which are posted below.

Have any public officials invested in Hawaiian Electric stock?

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A friend contacted me recently expressing interest in whether any legislators own stock in Hawaiian Electric that would create a financial conflict of interest if they participate in discussing or voting on any proposed bailout plan to aid the company.

Fair question. Do any legislators, or other public officials, have investments in Hawaiian Electric?

Luckily, there is a way to find out. But it is neither quick nor simple.

Financial disclosures

Public officials, including elected officials, appointed department heads and deputies, and members of a number of key boards and commissions, file financial disclosures with the State Ethics Commission every year. These are public records, and the information is available online.

The information required to be reported includes sources of income over $1,000 received by the person filing the report, as well as their spouse and any dependant children, real estate owned or transferred with the prior year, positions held in businesses or nonprofit organizations (“officership, directorship, trusteeship, or other fiduciary relationship”), as well as creditors and a couple of other types of financial information.

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