Our Georgia Case

Thoughts on our huge win

The first oral arguments in the entire case were before the Georgia Supreme Court.

With a few days to process what just happened, I wanted to share a bit of background on what we just did, though there is a great deal I can’t get into yet.

As many of you know, in early 2022 I was working with Margot Cleveland, submitting dozens of Open Records requests to Georgia Tech, the Georgia Attorney General’s office, and Georgia’s Department of Administrative Services. Many emails contained allusory statements to Antonakakis’ and Dagon’s role in the Alfa Bank allegations and DNC hack investigations but we weren’t getting many of the emails from 2016-2018 directly relevant to their work.

Around the time of the Sussmann trial, I had learned that Georgia Tech had paid over $100,000 in legal expenses for Antonakakis. David Dagon had submitted an invoice to Georgia Tech for half a million dollars, and others like Angelos Keromytis were also getting their legal bills paid for, despite Keromytis’ involvement stemming from his time at DARPA. That was a bombshell revelation to me because it suggested everything around this should have been public record.

I later learned that Dagon’s immunity agreement complicated his situation, and it appears he had to deal with the State of Georgia more directly to solicit payment for his legal expenses, engaging the former Attorney General Sam Olens as additional counsel, who was threatening the State of Georgia with lawsuits if they refused to pay.

There is a first amendment streak in me that I didn’t know was there. Leave aside my theories of their involvement in highly politicized “Russiagate” stories. To my mind, when taxpayers are footing the bill to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, there needs to be transparency.

I was at the Sussmann trial, live tweeting it from the media room for a few days before taking an opportunity to go to the courtroom. As I did, I ended up standing right next to John Durham and his team while we waited for the courtroom to open. No, I didn’t say anything to them, but Durham did pierce my soul with his gaze.

It was at the trial that emails from Antonakakis’ Gmail account took a central role, with indications of hundreds of emails being produced from Durham’s subpoenas.

That didn’t sit right with me, having just learned Georgia Tech was paying all his legal expenses. By then, I had submitted over 30 Open Records requests just to Georgia Tech. These emails at the trial were not included in those productions, and there was nothing about them that could have supported any exemptions.

It was rapidly becoming clear to me that Georgia Tech hadn’t done their due diligence.

I started researching Georgia’s Open Records law for hours on end. The statutory language made clear that requests could be made of any custodian. All of the case law supported that.

When I submitted my request through Mark Schamel, I was threatened with sanctions and repercussions almost immediately.

That led me to spend days looking for an attorney. I contacted over 30 law firms and not a single one was remotely interested. So then I began drafting a complaint letter, resigning myself to proceeding pro se against the quintessential big law attorney. I just happened to be digging into Smith v Northside, a huge case for Georgia’s Open Records, when I had an epiphany. What if I reached out to an attorney from that case?

And that’s what I did, and to my surprise, I got to discuss my case for the first time.

Fast forward a few months and we had a hearing scheduled in the case. Judge Schwall requested proposed orders and my understanding was that the positions would be argued at that hearing. Late one night, just a few days before the hearing, I was just going through the docket when I found a signed order dismissing our case.

The notifications from the court to my attorney didn’t come through. I had just stumbled onto the order dismissing our case and ordering that I pay their attorney fees. That began a long series of sleepless nights. In the following days, it became clear that Judge Schwall had changed nothing in the proposed order from their side.

There were pieces of it that had no basis in the record, that neither side had briefed, but had made it into the proposed order and ultimately the signed order from the Judge. That became a huge problem when we got to the Appeals Court.

In the following weeks, they provided the court legal invoices with all the key information entirely redacted, adding up to just shy of $54,000. A motion for reconsideration we filed was immediately denied.

I had assumed that if we lost, it would be on something out of left field. Something we’d completely missed. Instead, we were left with an order that I could not understand. That ate me up for the last two years. The case law only went in one direction and the facts of my case were quite similar to Cardinale v Keane and others.

At the Appeals Court, I didn’t entertain any notion that we could lose. Two of the Judges on the panel had heard the Cardinale case just about a year prior. There was just no way we were wrong.

And yet, we lost again in a unanimous ruling. Their ruling made even less sense, it didn’t even get to the heart of the issues, they said I was wrong to submit the request to the custodian as the law explicitly allows. In Cardinale, that was considered a fact issue. In my case, it was a fatal flaw that supported a pre-trial motion to dismiss and a sanctions award that was largely left in place by the Appeals Court, all while citing no case law. No cases out there contradicted us, but I was still being sanctioned.

That was the low point. I had a real decision to decide to go for Certiorari and play double or nothing.

If the Supreme Court didn’t grant Certiorari, my life would be ruined. All because I wanted records that everyone agreed were public records.

But if I walked away, that precedent would destroy numerous Open Records cases in process. Everyone submitting requests to custodians could similarly face a sanctions award.

So we took our stand, with the best attorneys in the State of Georgia on my side, and the Supreme Court ruled for us unanimously, agreeing with what I had done as a lowly pro se guy two years prior, facing down threats from big law.

We still have a fight ahead, but now it’s our turn.