Officials should identify donors paying for probe

Jay Miller’s newest column is an interesting look at the mystery of who bankrolled an investigation into the death of Billy the Kid. In recent days the public has learned, for the first time, that the trail leads through Gov. Bill Richardson.

Four years ago, two Lincoln County sheriff’s deputies began an investigation into whether Sheriff Pat Garrett might have shot someone else instead of Billy the Kid and then covered it up, Miller wrote. The kicker was that private money would finance their investigation.

Miller has been on the trail ever since. Who financed the probe?

“The situation screamed for some journalistic scrutiny. There has to be an unusual reason for someone to want to finance a criminal investigation,” he wrote. “This was like criminal justice in Billy the Kid’s day, when the notorious Santa Fe Ring controlled much of law enforcement and the judicial system in New Mexico.”

The Ruidoso News recently obtained documents that indicate that the investigation was funded with $6,500 from private donors that Richardson directed his press secretary to deliver.

You might remember, at the start of the investigation, Richardson holding a news conference to announce his support for it.

The point: Richardson wanted something – an investigation that would (and did) earn the state a great deal of national publicity. He found a way to get it done – secret donations. In his official capacity as governor, he directed a state employee to deliver the money for the probe.

Did Richardson give anything in return for the money, like, perhaps, a state contract? We don’t know, because we don’t know the identities of the donors.

Like so many other situations involving Richardson and some of the state’s other politicos, this one stinks. Public disclosure is necessary to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

Miller rightly wrote that there’s nothing illegal about private individuals giving to government agencies, but those agencies are supposed to identify the donors, which was not done in this case. The deputies claimed all along that the investigation was private, even though it was logged in at the sheriff’s department and the investigators planned to file a report with the sheriff at its conclusion.

The investigators recently quit their deputy positions, apparently in an attempt to solidify the line of separation they have claimed exists between the investigation and the sheriff’s department.

This might be a simple case of a defender of the Kid with some money to burn pitching in. But with all the pay-to-play stink surrounding the governor and emitting from Santa Fe, the public has every reason to suspect there’s something more nefarious going on. The only way to end such suspicion is public disclosure of the identities of the donors.