Montgomery County Fair
.JPG)
2008 Venice Film Festival
Extreme Makeover: Home edition
Attorney general's style makes news, raises eyebrows
E-mails show attorney general's management style can be vulgar. But 'it is what it is,' staff member says.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
COLUMBUS — Mervyn Jones II had trouble getting his start date as a $10-an-hour intern with Attorney General Marc Dann's Cleveland office this year.
No problem. The 6-foot, 5-inch tight end for Hiram College got help from his mom, U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones. "I just got a call from an irate Congresswoman who wants to know when her son is starting his job. Can we get a quick answer from Columbus so we can get moving on this," wrote Ed Kraus, co-director of Dann's Cleveland office.
Extras
When Jones had trouble getting his first paycheck, Dann knew about it. "He e-mailed me that he got his check on Saturday," Dann wrote his chief of staff, chief operating officer and first assistant attorney general a few days later. "Thanks."
Tubbs Jones is unapologetic about asking Dann's office to hire her son. "I help everybody in the world — kids — get a job," the Cleveland Democrat said. Dann, who runs an office with 1,400 employees, brushed off the question of whether the hire was political favoritism. "I hired a couple hundred people who weren't a Congresswoman's son," he said. "Should I discriminate against him because he's a Congresswoman's son?"
In his first 10 months in statewide office, Dann has emerged as an activist attorney general with a high profile, crusading against everything from underperforming charter schools to stores that sell cosmetic contact lenses without prescriptions. But while Dann has garnered plenty of media attention, a Dayton Daily News review of 4,300 e-mails from his office provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a management style not seen by the public. In the e-mails, he sometimes comes off as vulgar, overscheduled and a publicity hound.
"Marc says what he says. It is what it is," said Communications Director Leo Jennings III. "I'm sure everybody, at some point or another, has said 'Ah, I wish I had phrased that differently' two-tenths of a second after they hit the send button."
The e-mails show:
• Dann was furious with an agent for the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation and his supervisor for sending a critical letter to Montgomery County Prosecutor Mat Heck, a fellow Democrat. "Have the (expletive) apologized to matt heck yet?" Dann wrote in an e-mail.
• Jennings commented in an e-mail to Dann about a draft of a speech Dann was to give to the Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers: "This is a total bj for the trial lawyers," he wrote.
• Dann, who is Jewish, e-mailed Jennings on April 6 about an editorial that ran in his hometown paper, The (Youngstown) Vindicator: "Bentley said there are six nasty posts after the Vindy editorial. All about you," he wrote. "Jesus had it better on good friday."
Asked last week about the Good Friday line, Dann said, "Did I say that? ... I really stay away from religious jokes. So I would be really surprised about that, if I said that. That's not my sense of humor."
Contact this reporter at (614) 224-1624 or lbischoff@DaytonDailyNews.com.
