Perhaps the best investigative journalist in the western U.S. speaks on uncovering fraud by self-enrichers
It very much has to do with the Freedom of Information Act.
When Rone Tempest started reporting in Wyoming, he did a “financial scrub” on politicians including Sen. Mike Enzi.
“He looked like the Presbyterian elder that he is,” Tempest initially said. “He seemed to be … one of the politicians who could not enrich himself while in office.”
But Tempest, who has done journalism for a half-century and taught the craft at UC-Berkeley, “smelled a rat” in the power plant project Two Elk, he said.
“Generally, you look at each project that’s been awarded a lot of money,” Tempest said after mentioning the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. “In this case, Two Elk showed up.”
Tempest asked, “what in the world would this company be doing to get a federal stimulus grant?”
That’s when Tempest realized that the Enzi family was not immune from scandal. He learned that in their applications for two grants, Mike Enzi’s son, Brad Enzi, and Michael Ruffatto, presented Two Elk as a “carbon sequestration scientific research project,” enabling grants that enriched each of them. Enzi got $128,395 and Ruffatto, $955,343, according to a WyoFile story…
