Lewiston Morning Tribune Saturday, July 26, 1997
U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth is protesting to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's director over what she calls the "heavy-handed nature'' of the agency's raid of 40 Clearwater County record boxes last week.
And Idaho Department of Law Enforcement Director Robert Sobba says he is upset about U.S. Attorney General Betty Richardson advising a FEMA agent to take Idaho State Police troopers on the raid without consulting him.
Orofino residents have been buzzing about storm trooper tactics and bullet-proof vests and whether the federal government overreacted since federal agents raided Clearwater County's flood command center eight days ago.
More than a dozen county employees have been subpoenaed to appear Aug. 12 before a grand jury in Boise to testify about the expenditure of federal government funds on road repair.
Chenoweth, who got her start in politics in Clearwater County 33 years ago, said numerous county officials and employees have told her they would have gladly opened the records and made any requested copies if FEMA officials had asked for them.
"Instead, like a bull in a china shop, armed FEMA agents crawled through sagebrush, raced government vehicles into the site and stormed the county's warehouse to seize 40 boxes,'' she wrote in a letter dated Thursday to FEMA Director James Witt. "FEMA has interrupted the county's ability to do its everyday business and jeopardized its $1 million loan."
The county is at risk of defaulting on the loan, which is due in September, without the records necessary for compliance with its terms and FEMA relief requirements, Chenoweth said.
"I ask your immediate intervention to either return the original records to the county, or to copy at FEMA's expense, the records,'' she said in her letter to Witt. "Clearwater County is not a wealthy county."
Chenoweth said she questions the process by which the county's records were taken.
"When 40 boxes containing thousands of pages of records, both civil and criminal, are simply confiscated with only a mere receipt as proof, a very serious chain of custody issue arises,'' she said. "... It is not inconceivable, and probably very likely, that your agents' actions have affected any number of criminal cases currently being pursued by Clearwater County."
Sobba said the decision to assign ISP troopers to the raid does not rest with Richardson.
"I feel that once someone decided to get us involved on such a controversial issue, that professional courtesy would have dictated some effort to contact my office,'' he wrote in a letter dated Thursday to Richardson. "I am now left with numerous consequences on a matter that I had no input into."
Sobba said this incident and two others have strained relationships between the department and federal agencies.
Brian Whitlock, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Dirk Kempthorne, said Kempthorne's office has contacted FEMA on the behalf of constituents and asked the agency to respond.
Mike Tracy, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, said Craig's office hasn't had any inquiries about the raid that he knows about beyond one that was passed onto another agency.
Craig isn't going to weigh in on this case, in which a federal investigation is under way, until the probe is over, he said.
Chenoweth's chief of staff, Keith Rupp, said Chenoweth believes her office shouldn't get involved in the investigation of a possible crime until the facts of the case are known.
"But she also is going to take the position that it would be inappropriate for someone who is elected to represent the people before the federal government not to express constituent concerns about the way federal agencies handled this,'' he said. "We are getting a lot of very loud complaints from constituents about this."
Chenoweth told Witt that this type of heavy-handed show of force feeds the distrust between the federal government and Idahoans.
"I ask you to personally review this incident to inject some common sense,'' she wrote in her letter to Witt.