By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Has Governor Jerry Brown outlived his usefulness or what? It is, of course, very difficult for me to make this observation, as I am something like two decades or a quarter of a century older than he is. But he is an obsolescence, a man whose time has come and long gone, an embarrassment. And as all like him, he is the last one to realize it, while it is obvious to everyone else. The thing is, I can remember when he was a young upstart, the youthfully exuberant son of the former governor who took California by storm. Could that much time have really passed? It seems like yesterday. And maybe it really wasn’t that long ago but rather Jerry Brown is superannuated, aging at two or three times the normal rate, so that now he has one foot in the grave and the other in the dark hallway of senility…
And as he ages and dementia overtakes him, the world is closing in on him. He is in real trouble now and seemingly without the faculties to deal with it. On January 25, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith rejected the California Public Utilities Commission’s request to dismiss a lawsuit which is seeking the release of dozens of emails to and from Governor Brown’s office regarding the San Onofre nuclear plant debacle…
“Withholding records of allegedly ex parte secret deals resulting in shifting $3.3 billion of utility losses to ratepayers cannot possibly be a regulatory function of the Public Utility Commission,” Judge Goldsmith ruled, saying “It is not realistic that the Legislature intended that Public Utilities Code Sec. 1759 should be invoked to insulate Public Utilities Commission officials accused of corruption from public scrutiny…”
Judge Goldsmith called for the records to be transferred into the possession of another judge, a so-called special master, to review those communications to determine whether there are any confidentiality issues that would prevent those documents from being made public. The Public Utilities Commission and perhaps the governor himself may attempt to appeal Judge Goldsmith’s ruling to a higher court, but the writing is on the wall. The commission is very likely to contend that matters concerning it should be heard by a specialized set of judges in keeping with the commission’s status as a regulatory authority over power, telecommunications, water and transit companies. The commission has administrative law judges on staff it will maintain have expertise in understanding the complexities of public issues. The commission will seek to maneuver one of the judges it employs to rule that the public has no right to see communications from the governor and the commission. They will argue that the regulators and the governor have legitimate secrets to protect. However the administrative law judges employed by the commision rule, that decision will be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. When that issue gets to the Supreme Court, who do you think will prevail?
San Diego consumer attorney Mike Aguirre has been on a holy terror for the last year, seeking to get to the bottom of how it was that Southern California Edison could engage in a series of technical operational errors at the San Onofre nuclear power plant that necessitated its premature closing at a cost of $4.7 billion and then stick the utility’s ratepayers with the burden of 70 percent of that cost -$3.3 billion – through a settlement approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, which was then chaired by former Edison President Michael Peevey. Oh, did I forget to mention that Aguirre’s dogged pursuit of documentation, in conjunction with some nifty reporting by the San Diego Union Tribune, led to the revelation that the deal was worked out during a 2013 meeting at the Bristol Hotel in Warsaw, Poland, between Peevey and one of Edison’s vice presidents?
Now the commission is arguing that communications between public officials are not public documents…
Reluctantly, the commission’s lawyers handed over hundreds of documents in response to Aguirre’s requests. They did, however, withhold 65 emails to and from the governor’s office under claims of executive-privilege and deliberative-process confidentiality. They also withheld at least fifty emails sent or received by current commission president Michael Picker related to the San Onofre closure. Mr. Picker is a close associate, one might even say crony, of the governor. Previously, when he was a mere commissioner and not chairman, he voted right down the line with Mr. Peevey…
In both court papers and oral arguments commission lawyers insist Goldsmith has no jurisdiction over the commission and no authority to order it to produce documents. The commission has also, using public funds by the way, hired some high-powered criminal lawyers…
Judge Goldsmith, while acknowledging that the commission may be able to make some legal headway in arguing that the state’s Utilities Code categorizes the commission as a quasi-judicial agency so that any appeals of its decisions should be taken up by an appellate court and might therefore be able to take the matter out of his hands, knows, like the rest of us, that the commission and the governor are just stalling. When the matter gets before the appellate court or the Supreme Court, his ruling will be replicated. As he put it, “A core value in a democracy is the right of citizens to know the actions taken by public officials…”
Investigators from the California Attorney General’s office have sought and received at least six separate search warrants as part of their ongoing criminal probe. We already have a glimpse of how tied in with Peevey and Edison Brown was or is. On June 6, 2013, Governor Brown was in Rancho Mirage meeting with President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the midst of that meeting, Governor Brown took a phone call from Edison CEO Ted Craver. Craver sent a memo to Edison board members to give them, he wrote, “a quick report on my phone call with Gov. Brown. He said what we were doing seemed right under the circumstances.” A possible smoking gun in Craver’s memo is that he said Brown “indicated a willingness to” exonerate Edison of any wrongdoing with regard to the technical problems leading to the power plant shutdown…
We are also aware that Governor Brown, while in his position of public trust, is not above using his official position to engage in some energy-related profiteering himself. Last year he used his executive power as governor to extract from California’s oil regulating agency maps, geologic surveys and records relating to oil and natural gas reserves beneath his family’s 2,700-acre ranch in Colusa County. What more might we learn about his dealings when these sought-after communications are finally released?
If this sloppiness in which he, the immediate past attorney general, has baldfacedly engaged in corruption of his public office as if no one is looking when what is going on is perfectly obvious to even an 11-year-old school kid is not indication enough for you, dear reader, that our governor is on a steady slide into senility, then consider this: Jerry Brown is no longer actually serving as governor. His role has been usurped by Gavin Newsome, the lieutenant governor, my Sacramento sources tell me. Jerry Brown at this point is governor in name only. He has retreated to no one knows where, quite possibly to his ranch in Colusa County, to lay low. Mr. Newsome is handling nearly all of his functions. Governor Brown’s wife, I am told, is protecting him, afraid that he will at last have one of the deer-in-the-headlights moments he is constantly experiencing in front of a video camera…
Trust me, it takes one of us demented old bats to truly recognize another one. Now, if one of you would be so kind as to tell me where it was I set my monocle down…