Lest anyone think that the debate about Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s In fact, it is rather common for targets of lawsuits (or the recipient of a CID) pursuant to the Federal False Claims Act or the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to claim that they are being targeted for political reasons. It is also very common for the people who support such targets to think that they are being targeted for political reasons.
The broad outlines of the facts of the case are as follows: Prof. Mann was formerly at UVa, where he performed research into his global warming theories (or climate change theories, depending on which view of this matter you believe).
Some recent revelations about Dr. Mann’s research indicates that he falsified research results in order to obtain various grants from state and federal government sources. I am referring, specifically, to the “climate-gate” scandal that broke last fall in which several thousand emails to and from Dr. Mann somehow ended up in the public realm.
Many of those emails purport to show Dr. Mann conspiring with others to hide certain evidence showing various flaws in his theories. Mann and his supporters reply that those emails are taken out of context, etc.
I have previously discussed the phenomenon of people not being able to believe that a certain person would knowingly submit a false claim to the government based on pure emotion. For example, in an old post about fraud on the federal government by a hearing-impaired business man, we heard things like: “I don’t think he would commit fraud on the government–he has always been very supportive of the hearing-impaired community.”
Huh? How is it that being a supporter of a good cause automatically makes a person honest?
Anyway, UVa has resisted General Cuccinelli’s civil investigative demand, and has filed a motion to Mixx Delicious Digg Facebook Twitter