RFHC Files Public Information Requests to Validate ‘Leaked’ Washington County Documents

Recently Radio Free Hub City has been provided from an anonymous source multiple “leaked” partial documents from Washington County Government with serious accusations against a County Commissioner candidate. We understand that these partial documents have now been posted on social media, we will not be running a story on their contents. Instead, we have filed multiple Maryland Public Information Act requests with Washington County Government to validate the authenticity of the documents, obtain a copy of the complete documents, and verify the claims within the documents.

UPDATE: New information regarding this story is available in our initial analysis of available public records.

While others are publishing snippets on social media; we are waiting for the full legal record to ensure you aren’t being lied to through omission.

We believe these documents may be a potential weaponization of government resources to manipulate an ongoing democratic contest. When official, non-public documents are “leaked” to attack a candidate, it stops being a simple “leak” and becomes a systemic failure of the wall between governance and campaigning.

Voters have the right to know if these accusations are true, or if this is a coordinated political hit job by sharing only selected pieces of the documents. As such, we have requested expedited processing of our Public Information Act requests with Washington County, as well as notified the Office of Attorney General, as well as County and State Boards of Elections regarding this issue.

As with all of our reporting, we will absolutely do our due diligence and validate this information before reporting on the contents. Leaking documents anonymously in an attempt to manipulate the primary election holds serious legal ramifications, especially if this is in any way linked to any other political candidates or committees.

We will release the full documents from Washington County Government as soon as we receive and analyze the results of our outstanding records requests.

Article by Ken Buckler, President of Radio Free Hub City

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