Judge challenges Hatch with phone record

08/23/2006

Pat Doyle, Star Tribune
Last update: August 22, 2006 – 10:20 PM

A row between Attorney General Mike Hatch and a judge over a pair of consumer protection cases took a new twist Tuesday as the judge released records to challenge Hatch’s claim about a disputed phone conversation between them.
Ramsey County District Judge William Leary has accused Hatch, the DFL nominee for governor, of impropriety in suggesting during a call that a TV news crew was going to look into the judge’s handling of the cases.

Hatch acknowledges calling Leary, but says he did so after his staff complained that the judge was making unreasonable demands in an attempt to settle one of the cases and suggesting that the litigation was politically motivated. A hearing is scheduled Thursday before the county’s chief judge on Hatch’s efforts to remove Leary from the two cases.

In denying impropriety, Hatch last week said he never indicated to the judge that he had alerted the news media to the cases. Hatch said he believed it was proper to call the judge because one of the cases was in mediation, and he quickly ended the call after the judge told him that settlement talks were over.

To bolster his argument that no improper conversations occurred, Hatch said that the call lasted only one minute, explaining, “You can’t say much more in one minute.”

The attorney general released telephone billing records showing a one-minute call was placed at 4:21 p.m. on June 12 from a cell phone he uses. The records show the call was placed to the central switchboard for Ramsey County and the City of St. Paul, and Hatch says he was transferred from there to the judge’s office.

But Leary Tuesday produced his own records that showed his chambers received a seven-minute call that began at 4:22 on June 12 from another cell phone. Leary concluded it was the cell phone that Hatch used in their conversation, and the judge included its number in a legal document filed Tuesday.

Reached at that number, Hatch told a reporter that he has both government and personal cell phones. He said the number is linked to his personal cell phone and he may have used it to talk to Leary for seven minutes after contacting his office briefly on the government cell phone.

“Whether it was seven or one, it doesn’t matter as long as there was nothing improper said,” Hatch said Tuesday.

More disputes still ahead

Hatch said that when he placed the call he believed that one of the cases was still in mediation and that it was proper to talk to a judge about the case at that stage.

“At no time did he indicate to me until the end [of the conversation] that the mediation process was over with,” Hatch said. “If he believed there was an improper communication, he should have told me,” and not allowed the conversation to continue for seven minutes.

Hatch said he took the initiative to end the conversation when the judge told him the mediation was over.

Leary was unavailable for comment Tuesday, but, in a court hearing, he has denied ever suggesting that the cases were politically motivated. He said he told Hatch’s lawyers that he was “sensitive to the fact that the state needed to consider the public and political implications of any settlement.”

In seeking the judge’s removal from the cases, Hatch’s office is complaining that Leary blocked state investigators’ efforts to get information from the defendants and improperly pushed for a weak settlement in separate meetings with lawyers for each party during mediation.

The dispute could get even more rancorous. During an interview on Tuesday, Hatch alluded to Leary having worked previously for a law firm that represented Allina Health System, whose conduct Hatch had challenged, before becoming a judge.