The Houston Independent School District filed a lawsuit against the Texas Attorney General’s Office in an attempt to keep public information from our 13 Investigates team.<\/p>\n
13 Investigates has been formally requesting information about the district’s relationship with the agency for months and hasn’t gotten any answers, so sending an open records request for emails was our next move.<\/p>\n
In May, 13 Investigates emailed a request to HISD for about a month’s worth of emails between the PR firm and four HISD employees.<\/p>\n
Rather than release them, an attorney for the district told us they were going to ask the attorney general’s office whether they had to or not, which is within their right.<\/p>\n
In a letter to the AG’s Office, HISD cited a few reasons they shouldn’t have to, including attorney-client privilege.<\/p>\n
“With such a scattershot of communications like that (to say) they’re all, every single one of them attorney-client privilege, that doesn’t pass the smell test,” said local First Amendment attorney Joseph Larsen.<\/p>\n
He said attorney-client privilege is between an attorney and a client, and the PR firm is neither.<\/p>\n
The attorney general’s office said that too, and told HISD nearly everything we requested had to be released.<\/p>\n
“If the attorney general rules against the governmental body, in most cases, they’re right because it’s almost exceptional that they do rule against the governmental body,” Larsen said.<\/p>\n
Generally, when the attorney general issues its ruling, that’s the end of it. If the office rules documents have to be released, we get the records we requested, but not this time.<\/p>\n
HISD wrote a letter to the AG’s office asking them to reconsider, but after 13 Investigates reminded them that’s not allowed, the district filed a lawsuit against the AG.<\/p>\n
“It’s significant,” Larsen said, adding that it would be easy to spend thousands of dollars in taxpayer funding to the district on the lawsuit to prevent the release of information.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit is against the attorney general’s office, not ABC13. In it, the district claims the Attorney General got it wrong.<\/p>\n
We wanted to know how often HISD has sued the Attorney General’s Office and found just six in the last 10 years, which includes ours.<\/p>\n
We don’t know if all of the lawsuits are related to open records requests, but it shows just how infrequently the district is filing these suits.<\/p>\n
Larsen has been party to many of these cases over the years and said it’s fair to wonder if the district has something to hide.<\/p>\n
“It seems like the point of it may be to simply obscure what’s going on and to make it more difficult for the Houston public to know what HISD is really up to,” Larsen said.<\/p>\n
He said that even when the cases should be simple, it could take years to resolve.<\/p>\n
13 Investigates is actively monitoring the status of the case.<\/p>\n
We asked HISD for a comment, and they said they do not comment on pending litigation. The PR firm and outside counsel that filed the lawsuit for HISD have not responded to our questions.<\/p>\n
Contact 13 Investigates<\/p>\n