Newly sworn-in Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) may soon fulfill a document request that her Republican predecessor’s administration resisted for nearly two years, the Portland Press Herald reported Monday.
“The Freedom of Access Act exists because the public has a right to know about the work undertaken by its government,” a spokesperson for Mills, who took office on Wednesday, told the paper. “It is our understanding that the LePage Administration has left a number of these requests unfulfilled, and it is the intention of our Administration to work to locate, inventory, and honor them in as timely a manner as possible.”
Specifically, the paper’s requests for receipts related to former Gov. Paul LePage’s taxpayer-funded stay (or, perhaps, stays) in the spring of 2017 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. have gone unfulfilled, despite, as the paper noted, the taxpayer-funded reservations’ role in an Emoluments Clause lawsuit against President Donald Trump.
The attorneys general of Maryland and Washington, D.C., who filed the suit, included LePage in their list of subpoenas for information relevant to the effort.
