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514: 'The public does not yet have any sense of the breadth and depth of what's going to be coming out'
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Disgraced former state Sen. Ray Holmberg has indicated, through his legal counsel, that he will be pleading guilty to federal criminal charges related to international travel to solicit sex with children. "When that happens," Attorney General Drew Wrigley said on this episode of Plain Talk, "everything that we have becomes a public record."
An untold number of public documents, including email messages and more, are currently inaccessible by the news media and the public due to state law that exempts records related to on-going criminal investigations. But once Holmberg official pleads guilty, which will happen later this year, that exemption will go away, and Wrigley says his office will work to preemptively make as much information available to the public as possible.
Wrigley also spoke with me and my co-host Chad Oban about the on-going rift between North Dakota and Minnesota over fossil-fuel energy. Minnesota has passed a law mandating that all energy used in the state be from sources that don't emit carbon by 2040. North Dakota, which has successfully sued Minnesota over similar legislation in the past, and which provides the bulk of Minnesota's electricity, much of it from coal-fired power plants, is objecting.
Wrigley sits on the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which recently sent Minnesota a letter asking the state to reconsider or reform the law. "We're not at war with Minnesota," he said. "We're not even at war with their statute. But we could be."
Also on this episode, Gannon University Professor Jeff Bloodworth, who authored a recent Washington Post article about the struggles Democrats are having with rural voters, took our questions about how Democrats might go about fixing that problem.
"Urban educated liberals took over the Democratic Party and started booting out working class Democrats," he said. He argues that the party's leaders currently see little need to figure out why rural Americans aren't voting for them. "It's just easier to stereotype rural voters," he said.
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