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Congresswoman Val Hoyle (D-Ore.) has not turned over public records stored on her personal devices to the state agency she once ran, nearly two months after she said she would do so.
It’s been 11 months since the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries asked Hoyle, who served as the agency’s commissioner for four years before being elected to Congress, to hand over her personal devices so the agency could inspect them for public records. (Any communication sent or received to an elected official’s personal email account or phone that pertains to official state business is, by Oregon law, a public record.) In September, following scrutiny by WW, she finally agreed to provide BOLI with any public communications on those devices.
To date, BOLI spokeswoman Rachel Mann says, Hoyle has not turned over public records held on her personal devices.
“We have not yet received the congresswoman’s records from her personal devices,” Mann said Friday. “[We are] still working with her attorney on that front.”
The agency asked for Hoyle’s records shortly before, and then once shortly after, Hoyle left her position at BOLI in early January. The agency asked because staff believed there was reason to believe that Hoyle conducted official business on personal devices throughout her four-year term.
Indeed, WW’s reporting this spring and summer corroborated that: Records WW obtained show that Hoyle communicated on her personal phone about a $550,000 state grant Hoyle helped shepherd to a nonprofit co-founded by one of her top campaign donors, the embattled cannabis company CEO Rosa Cazares, whose relationship with former Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan is now under criminal investigation by the federal government.
WW this summer pressed Hoyle on why she hadn’t turned over her personal devices to BOLI for inspection. Hoyle said she had seen neither of the two emails BOLI staff sent her in January asking for those devices. Hoyle promised at the time that she would sift through her devices alongside her attorney and hand over any material that constituted a public record. She declined to hand over the devices themselves, saying that for the sake of thoroughness, she and her attorney would inspect them independently. (That’s despite BOLI claims it has technology that can sort through devices quickly.)
In early September, Hoyle told BOLI she would turn over the records by the end of the month. It’s now November, and she still hasn’t done so.
Kristina Edmunson, a spokeswoman for Hoyle, says she has turned over all texts from her personal devices to a lawyer she retained to sift through them. Edmunson also says that after an initial meeting between Hoyle’s attorney and BOLI staff Oct. 10 to discuss the records, Hoyle’s attorney did not hear from the agency again until last week.
“Texts from Congresswoman Hoyle’s personal device have been turned over to [Emily] Matasar who is working with the agency to determine which texts meet the definition of a public record under Oregon’s public records law and to avoid any conflicts of interest,” Edmunson says. “Congresswoman Hoyle is not involved in that decision-making process.”