—

When Rone Tempest started reporting in Wyoming, he did a “financial scrub” on politicians including Sen. Mike Enzi.

“He looked like the Presbyterian elder that he is,” Tempest initially said. “He seemed to be … one of the politicians who could not enrich himself while in office.”

But Tempest, who has done journalism for a half-century and taught the craft at UC-Berkeley, “smelled a rat” in an Enzi-related development in the power plant project Two Elk, he said.

“Generally, you look at each project that’s been awarded a lot of money,” Tempest said after mentioning the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. “In this case, Two Elk showed up.”

Tempest asked, “What in the world would this company be doing to get a federal stimulus grant?”

That’s when Tempest realized that the Enzi family was not immune from scandal. He learned that in their applications for two grants, Mike Enzi’s son, Brad, and Michael Ruffatto, presented Two Elk as a “carbon sequestration scientific research project,” enabling grants that enriched each of them. Enzi got $128,395 and Ruffatto, $955,343, according to a WyoFile story titled “Two Elk stimulus: Big paychecks but no new jobs.”

“There was the stimulus program and they got these two grants,” Tempest said in mid-March at a Utah Society of Professional Journalists event in Ogden, Utah. “They basically just paid themselves.”

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To get the information, Tempest had to make two Freedom of Information Act requests, seeking Enzi and Ruffatto’s expenditures.

The first time, “The PR people did their job,” Tempest said. “There was a belief in the press and its role.

“Occasionally, people will do what they should do,” Tempest added. “You can tell them that you want to avoid the FOIA process.”

But Tempest wanted more information. Upon his second request, however, personnel did provide it. So he had to pay $450 to file a FOIA lawsuit.

“What you are trying to do as a journalist is get a story,” Tempest said. “It’s not just to have fun harassing the federal government; it’s to get a story.”

He found Daniel Stotter, a Corvallis-based attorney, for advice, seeing that his quest may go to the courts.

“I can’t pay you anything,’” Tempest recalled telling Stotter. “He said, ‘I will give you 25 minutes.’”

(Stotter, over several months, ended up giving several hours of his time — and Tempest ended up sending him a bottle of Oregon pinot noir, Tempest told me.)

Stoddard’s most important advice?

“You are not trying to go to trial,” Tempest reported.

After paying, Tempest was assigned to an assistant U.S. attorney.

Tempest then went to a pretrial conference with a federal judge. He had already been told that his FOIA request was denied under Exemption 7 of the law – the “ongoing investigation” statute, as Tempest described it.

“I said, ‘Look, I’ve been doing this for two years,’” Tempest said in reply. “I haven’t found any footprints of federal investigators.”

Tempest talked with the attorney, who did a review and then said they were willing to settle.

“It got a lot of attention that FOIA was available to everybody and produced a pretty good story,” Tempest said.

That story, also in WyoFile, was titled “Claiming misuse of stimulus funds, feds demand $5.7M payback.”

Tempest wondered if the issue would have been addressed had he not done so.

He then pointed out that the average bank robbery is $15,000.

“This is someone who stole $7 million,” he then added.

He then said that he was “bugging” people to “keep the story alive.”

“My answer is that I don’t think this would have come to light without the work that we did,” Tempest then said. “(Ruffatto) basically had taken all of the money that was supposed to be for a scientific research project to address global warming and help the economy and provide jobs; he took all that and used it on himself.”

Ruffatto was later charged with federal criminal fraud – and that was reported only because Tempest searched the Public Access to Court Electronic Records service.

“I check PACER almost every day,” said Tempest, who is retired as he was when he did the stories. He had said that “one of the benefits of being retired” is researching for such pieces.

Ruffatto, who has pled guilty, got an eighth sentencing delay last month, Tempest reported after traveling to Pittsburgh, where the hearing took place.

—

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