Are We Protecting John Merrill?

Before we get to the main topic, we have some words of wisdom: If you call a black person a "n****r," especially one who's technically your boss, you just might expect him to try to have you fired.

***** 

Earlier today a regular reader suggested we have previously protected Secretary of State John Merrill. Let's give you some background on this.

First, according to most government flow charts, the secretary of state is an office that ranks third in the executive branch of our government, following the lieutenant governor and preceding the attorney general. He or she is responsible for state elections and business governance.

It was only a few months ago that we became aware that current secretary John Merrill had been embroiled in a sex scandal in 2014. Why hadn't we known? We obviously miss a great deal that goes on in our government, but that is a biggie. We could have been working on a time-consuming assignment or we could have had the flu or we may have been the victim of defective technology the week this story broke. 

The bottom line is: she said they met once and engaged in oral sex; he said they met once and kissed and he broke it off before anything more serious happened. We're going to take a wild guess here that Merrill's wife must have thought whatever happened was serious enough.

We're going to take another wild guess that, judging from Merrill's self promotion as secretary, he plans on running for an even higher office during the next election cycle. While the woman involved with Merrill was certainly no teenager, her involvement with the politician would certainly do him no good. 

That brings us to the next point of our reader: Did we seek to cover up the fact that Merrill used state resources to hide his behavior. Since we were unaware of his behavior to begin with, how did we seek to cover it up? Our reader thinks this blog was not unaware, but had been sent information on the scandal in 2014.

We've thoroughly looked through our e-mails for that time frame, since this is the route he said the material was sent to us, and we've found nothing. Do we ever delete the communications? Only ones which ask something akin to: My boyfriend drove to work drunk this morning. Can you check to see if he was involved in the fender bender at the corner of Pine and Irvine? If we had received information an elected official was using our tax dollars to hide an extra-marital affair, does anyone out there really think we would have hidden this from our readers? 

We're going to continue to look into the allegations against Merrill. Obviously, no one found them to be legitimate at the time; however, we think our readers have a right to know as much as possible about the claims. If Merrill is planning on running for lieutenant governor or governor, these charges will soon resurface no matter what. 

Rest assured there will be more to come, and comments are welcome...