To agency chief Jane Lubchenco and others inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, how or whether they discipline employees — and how they arrived at those decisions — is obviously nobody's business.
And they are dead wrong.
The fact is, Lubchenco's and NOAA's seeming refusal to seemingly take any significant action against those enforcement agent and prosecutors cited by federal investigators for excessive and wrongful tactics against fishermen and waterfront businesses like the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction is very much the public's business.
To keep people like ousted NOAA police chief Dale Jones, who employed virtually no oversight over a multi-million fund built on the backs of fishermen's fines and forfeitures, is an affront not only to fishermen, but to every American taxpayer and to the state and federal lawmakers calling for answers.
In that vein, state Attorney General Martha Coakley has every right to demand — not request, demand — NOAA turn over all documents showing the decision-making that went into keeping the likes of Jones, former Gloucester-based agent Andy Cohen, chief counsel Lois Schiffer and prosecutors Deirdre Casey, Chuck Juliand and Mitch MacDonald on the taxpayers' payroll.
Indeed, Coakley would be justified in warning that a continued refusal to do would be tantamount to an obstruction of justice on a par with Jones' infamous document-shredding party that was carried out as the Commerce Department's Inspector General's Office was diving deep into a probe of the level of wrongdoing that has come to define NOAA's entire, corrupt enforcement organization.
Only time will tell when or even whether NOAA will answer Coakley's demands.
Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times