If you’re curious to know who may have frequented the Governor’s Mansion since 2012, it seems you’re out of luck.
WHNT News says that the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) is refusing to release the Mansion’s visitor logs. In a letter to the station, the agency said that doing so would pose a security risk. WHNT had asked for visitor information from January 2012 to October 2016 through an Open Records Law request.
While the reports would likely have detailed the number of visits made by the Governor’s alleged mistress, Rebekah Mason, the station notes that more serious claims could be cleared up through examination of the records.
In March of 2016, Bentley fired Spencer Collier, who formerly headed ALEA. Amid questions over his termination, Wendell Ray Lewis -who served on the Governor’s security detail- claimed that Collier forced him to delete entries in the Mansion visitor log.
Collier has since explained that Lewis’s claim was a matter of confusion over changes being made to the logging system, but adamantly denied the implication that he attempted to cover up or remove information from the state record. In October, the Attorney General’s office backed him up.
At the time, then-A.G. Luther Strange cleared Collier of any wrongdoing, stopping short of calling the probe against him a waste of time.
“In the course of the investigation, no witness provided credible evidence of criminal ‘misuse of state funds.’ No witness provided credible evidence of any other criminal violation on the part of former Secretary Collier. Finally, no witness established a credible basis for the initiation of a criminal inquiry in the first place,” Attorney General Strange’s office said in a statement.
However, ALEA had used the claim as justification for firing the top law enforcement official, leaving many questions left unanswered.
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