Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen speaks at a rally featuring former President Donald Trump in Bozeman on Aug. 9, 2024. (Photo by Blair Miller, Daily Montanan)
A simple thank you would have sufficed.
Heck, with as little response as we often get, an answer would have been even better.
Instead, the Daily Montanan’s thanks for covering the many problems that seem to have been on a slow simmer at the Montana Highway Patrol, which is overseen by the Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and the Montana Department of Justice, was a cease-and-desist letter, threatening legal action if we didn’t remove a staff survey his department commissioned.
A little bit of background: For months, largely through the hard work of deputy editor Keila Szpaller, we have been tracking some of the challenges and difficulties that troopers have had within the Montana Highway Patrol, including an abysmal lack of morale, coupled with a deep distrust of leadership.
Stories that we’ve reported included the heartbreaking story of Zach Miller, a former trooper whose reward for doing the right thing — asking for help while experiencing mental health struggles — was dismissal from the job he loved.
For my money, Miller should be the poster child of everything you should want in a trooper — brave enough to go to any scene, then even more brave to admit that sometimes what happens at a job doesn’t always stay there. He was brave enough to trust the promises of help without punishment for giving voice to the mental health struggles he faced and yet, he was discarded instead of uplifted.
Next, we covered the case of Trooper Alicia Bragg, who was terminated because she had the audacity to bring up concerns about how fellow troopers were feeling and being treated — troopers that, ahem, put their lives on the line in the name of public safety. Every. Day.
Her reward for being a courageous leader was the same as Miller, termination.
In addition to being former highway troopers, both Miller and Bragg share another common trait — they both have also won their respective cases against the state; Miller settled with a disability claim, and Bragg won a preliminary step toward a successful wrongful termination settlement. And both had to fight the state for their rights.
When we heard that the Montana Highway Patrol had done a climate survey, and it had even spent thousands of public dollars to have a firm conduct the survey in a way that could be anonymous so that troopers could share their feelings, it piqued our interest.
But not just because it was a survey. And not just because it could have information that is undeniably intriguing to a journalist and the public.
Instead, we were struck by the notion that the leaders within the Montana Department of Justice realized there’s such a problem there — with people who are tasked with public safety — that employees feared speaking honestly, for fear of retribution.
I have spent my entire career connected to reporting on the justice system and people who work adjacent to it. State troopers — and law enforcement of any variety — do not scare easily and are hard to intimidate.
But there it was: Apparently, there was a well founded belief that public employees doing the public’s business were so afraid that they couldn’t speak without fearing for their jobs. That’s just not pearl clutching, when there are well known examples like Bragg and Miller.
Now, back to the suing part.
When we obtained a copy of the survey, we published it. If you don’t believe anything I am saying, go ahead, read it for yourself.
But Knudsen doesn’t want you to read it. He’s threatening to sue the Daily Montanan for not removing it from our website (it remains there still). If he didn’t want to bring attention to the nearly 400-page document, threatening to sue for its removal seems like a guarantee that people will want to read it. You know, that ol’ thing about the forbidden fruit.
It says a lot about Knudsen’s administration that he would work so hard to stop the publication of an unflattering, even damning report, rather than just do the hard work of restoring confidence from the people the rest of us rely on for public safety.
Moreover, Knudsen doesn’t appear very familiar with how his department is spending money because the survey’s entire purpose was to make it so that it could be shared anonymously — and shared widely. The survey was conducted with public funds, about a public agency, and involves public employees. All of those things would certainly seem to trigger certain provisions in the Montana Constitution, the same document that he has sworn to uphold and defend.
And privacy interests, which he cited in his letter to us?
Hard to do it when there are no names attached to comments.
The Montana Attorney General’s Office routinely offers silence when it comes to questions from the press, the Daily Montanan included. The staff there seem to be too busy, too self-important to answer the press or the public, but not so busy that they can’t threaten to sue journalists.
What may be even more hard to figure is why Austin Knudsen believes that threatening us will stop us.
And given how many times Knudsen has lost and his seeming lack of understanding of the Montana Constitution, I like our chances.