Judge Says Trump Signed Statement With Data His Lawyers Told Him Was False
from the you-can’t-use-government-contractors’-statements-as-evidence dept
While we’ve been warning about the dangers of government contractors’ “expert” reports in the past, we have rarely heard of a case where a court finds a contractor lying about its own statements. A case out of Georgia, however, might change that. As we’ve highlighted, US District Judge Amy Totenberg found the US Army Contracting Command (CDC) to have committed fraud against the town of Brunswick. The CDC is suing the town for the use of the contractor’s reports, asserting that the reports contained material misrepresentations that undermined the town’s defense.
As a result of the suit, the CDC will have to hand over all of the reports containing material misrepresentations and will not be allowed to withhold some reports. This makes it clear that the US government’s claim that there is a “public right to information” is false. The judge specifically acknowledged this: she found that the government’s use of the reports as evidence was a crime.
She also found that the statements were “false” because they were not backed up by the information that the government had promised the town. Rather, the contract states that the information would be “reasonably acceptable to the contractor as of the date of this quotation.”
For example, the contract requires CDC to make a “preparation and submission” a written statement describing the report’s scope, date, and intended audience. The contract requires CDC to provide notice if the report is incomplete, inaccurate or misleading. The contract also states that CDC may make the report available for review by others. Once the CDC reports are published, however, no one is allowed to look at it.
The judge further noted that some of the statements in the reports were more than 40 years old, although the contractor could have made the statement as early as the 1960s. The statement that “the risk of injury or illness does not require that the contractor stay” after drinking or eating at the beach is about 60 years old. Further, the contract states that the contractor is to make “reasonably acceptable” copies of the reports. The reports have been made available to the town of Brunswick in its entirety