When lawyers spin, truth suffers

Former Wyoming House Speaker Tom Lubnau has written several recent columns for Cowboy State Daily that are long on confidence and short on truth. In two separate pieces — one on July 23 and another on Oct. 1 — Lubnau made statements in opposition to investigations into Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock that are flatly false, and he’s repeated them even after they were disproven.

In his Oct. 1 column, Lubnau wrote that “Hadlock was investigated by Weston County Attorney Michael Stulken, the attorney general’s office and Gov. Mark Gordon. All reached the same conclusion. Hadlock showed extreme indifference but should not be removed from office.”

That claim is not just misleading — it’s entirely false. Weston County Attorney Michael Stulken never investigated Hadlock’s handling of the election, and he confirmed that fact directly in an email to the News Letter Journal: “Tom Lubnau’s representation in the Cowboy State Daily article is incorrect in relation to my office conducting an investigation.”

Lubnau also claimed that the attorney general investigated Hadlock. That, too, is untrue. Although Secretary of State Chuck Gray formally requested such an investigation in March, three separate attorneys general have declined to take it up — and not one has made a public comment on Hadlock’s case.
Ironically, the only real investigation came from Gray himself, whose office uncovered Hadlock’s falsified post-election audit — a felony offense. But the governor and the attorney general ignored that evidence, even as Gordon’s own attorney admitted to lawmakers last week that the secretary’s investigation was broader and more thorough than the governor’s limited internal review.

It’s not surprising Lubnau chose to ignore the one investigation conducted by the elected official who actually oversees Wyoming’s elections. After all, when he was Speaker of the House, Lubnau helped engineer the infamous “Hill Bill” — the Legislature’s attempt to strip authority from an elected executive branch officer because lawmakers didn’t like who voters had chosen for the job. Fortunately, the Wyoming Supreme Court quickly found Lubnau’s attempts to disenfranchise Wyoming voters unconstitutional, but their effort to strip the powers of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction cost Wyoming taxpayers millions of dollars.

Lubnau’s habit of calling others “grandstanders” would be funny if it weren’t so hypocritical. In that same Oct. 1 column, he sneered that lawmakers investigating the Hadlock situation were “grandstanding” — and dismissed the Legislature’s efforts as “a flourish of performance art.”

That’s rich coming from a man who recently threw his own public tantrum after being told he would have to testify during public comment — just like every other Wyoming citizen — at the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee meeting in August. Lubnau later used his Cowboy State Daily platform to whine about it, suggesting his constitutional rights had somehow been trampled.

In truth, Lubnau was allowed to speak for more than 30 minutes. The only thing he was denied was the special treatment he apparently thinks he deserves. It was a Meghan Markle moment of political theater — a man sulking not because he was silenced, but because he wasn’t escorted down a red carpet.

And when he finally did testify, Lubnau used his time to mislead lawmakers about the Wyoming Public Records Act. His demonstration on how local governments supposedly need to “protect” confidential information was a farce — full of unnecessary, nonsensical redactions that concealed even the most harmless information, like the name of the county, the department or the person requesting the record. Instead of clarifying the issue, he proved the point many of us have been making for years: that government lawyers too often see the public as a nuisance to be managed, not as clients to be served.

This is the thread running through all of Tom Lubnau’s recent commentaries — a willingness to distort facts in defense of the bureaucracy, not the people. That might make him an effective attorney for his government clients, but it makes him a poor steward of public truth.

So the next time you read one of Lubnau’s columns, take it with a healthy grain of salt. He’s not writing as a neutral expert or a guardian of public integrity. He’s writing as a lawyer — one who uses every rhetorical weapon at his disposal to defend the institutions of government, even when they fail the people they’re supposed to serve.