How far will the “Courthouse Gang” go to protect Delgaudio?

As reported in the Washington Post yesterday, Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Theo Stamos says she never received the records and documents provided by former Delgaudio county aide Donna Mateer that support her allegations of his misuse of office. Stamos received only a “letter” written by Mateer. This is what she told the Post:

The question was, based on that letter, whether there was a basis upon which a prosecution might go forward,” Stamos said. “My assessment, from the statement alone, was that it would be extremely difficult to mount any type of a successful prosecution, as it was based on the observations of a now-terminated employee.

“The question was” according to who? This is an enormous revelation, pointing to a massive cover-up perpetrated by Scott York and/or Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Jim Plowman to protect their (fill in the blank here) Eugene Delgaudio. One or both of them calculated that obtaining an engineered recommendation from an independent commonwealth’s attorney that they not go forward with an investigation would allow them the pretense of due diligence. They weren’t counting on a reporter doing her job and talking to Stamos, nor were they counting on citizens mounting their own independent investigation. I’m afraid that “Oops, I forgot to include the attachment” is not going to get these boys off the hook.

The story has now been picked up by Too Conservative, where Delgaudio apologists regularly troll and run interference for him. Predictably, the “Barbara blog empire” (Delgaudio’s own term, from an email obtained by a citizen) has appeared to create a parallel distracting narrative and wage personal attacks on those trying to discover the truth. We’ve seen this all before, many times. The author also makes the good point that Stamos may not have seen the request for her opinion as a formal referral. It’s hard to believe that she would issue a formal recommendation without any supporting documentation on which to base it; it may have appeared as an informal request for opinion to which she responded as a courtesy to a colleague. After all, the only purpose of the request was to obtain the desired “recommendation” so that York could wave it like a flag.

If Stamos was used this way without her consent, potentially damaging the integrity of her office, there’s no reason for her to cooperate with this cover-up. In fact, there’s every reason for her to cooperate with the investigation into the cover-up. Real Advocate PAC has this morning issued a FOIA demand to determine exactly what documents each commonwealth’s attorney had in their possession. The respective responses to this demand will tell us more about the extent of the cover-up.

None of this answers the question of why any of the players – Scott York, the rest of the board, the entire Loudoun County Republican Committee, the donors who get special favors and consideration – are still willing to associate themselves with a man who makes his living by telling defamatory lies and inciting hatred against a group of his own constituents. They might in the past have gotten away with claiming that they didn’t know, but they can’t do that anymore. They are all culpable now.