Ironic that GOP requests Roy Cooper's records

For the state Republican Party, there’s irony in a clearly political and wasteful request for 14 years of records from the office of state Attorney General Roy Cooper: The GOP’s own governor, the Honorable Pat McCrory, has been notoriously slow in responding to records requests from the media, even using technicalities in the law to delay and in some cases trying to make them prohibitively expensive to get.

The motivation for the party’s assault on Cooper is no mystery. He’s a likely candidate for governor against McCrory, and the party wants to try to handicap Cooper by digging through records in an attempt to embarrass or discredit him.

As is the case with any citizen, the party is perfectly within its rights to seek records. But there ought to be a purpose to it, beyond just trying to give a political opponent a little grief.

Or, in this case, a lot of grief.

The party has asked for copies of what seems like every email and piece of correspondence Cooper and his senior staff have sent or received in the last 14 years he has been in office. It also wants every Twitter and Facebook message, official appointment paperwork, expense reports, official opinions and internal memos.

Understand, this is a public office to which the people have elected Cooper four times, and virtually everything the office has done has been on the record for 14 years. The record is there for all to see. There are few mysteries.

And here’s a good one: The party also wants details about the operations of agencies within Cooper’s Department of Justice, including the State Bureau of Investigation and the State Crime Lab. Might as well check the kitchen sinks in the building while they’re at it.

Either the state Republican Party is just too lazy to do this work or it wants to tie up a public office with a time-consuming, purely partisan request, wasting taxpayer money.

And 36 days after the request, the party said it had waited long enough. Really? A month and change is enough time for a huge government office to provide 14 years’ worth of records? Media representatives have waited far, far longer for the governor and his administration to provide public documents of far less scope.

North Carolinians should be offended by this kind of waste, and the Republican Party ought to be just plain embarrassed. This is supposed to be the party, after all, of careful spending and belt-tightening and judicious oversight of the public purse.

Apparently when the party’s self-interest is involved, it’s time to open the taxpayers’ wallets and have at it.

The party says it will go to court to get Cooper to comply more quickly. Great. Now the public can spend even more money on a silly paper chase.

This isn’t some serious, earnest attempt to pursue legitimate questions about legitimate issues of public interest. It’s a farcical hunt for nothing in particular, with about as much credibility as a wild goose chase.

This story was originally published April 24, 2015 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Ironic that GOP requests Roy Cooper's records."