What exactly is your definition of “very very thorough”? The reason I ask is that Freeh had a full time crew of lawyers and professional investigators working full time for 7 months interviewing approximately 350 individuals and culling through 3.5 million documents/records to arrive at his OPINION. I believe Freeh went into his investigation with no preconceived notion of what his opinion would end up being.
Since you’re legally precluded from discussing any of the things contained in what constitutes Freeh’s work product, perhaps you can tell us then in sufficient detail, the process you and your group followed to reach your own OPINION as to the veracity or lack thereof of Freeh’s OPINION.
Now from what I understand, the agreement to view Freehs’s work product required it be done at the law offices of Saul Ewing in Philadelphia. How did that work? How many and specifically which trustees did you have camped out at the Ewing offices full time culling through 3.5 million documents and for how long considering most work full time at other jobs? With 3.5M documents, how do you know that you didn’t miss some that Freeh used in formulating his OPINION? Did your review include interviewing each and every persons that the Freeh team interviewed since verbal impressions can sometimes be more telling than what just might be scribed in an interviewer’s notes? Did you document and can you tell us what is missing from the Freeh work product (other than an interview with JVP) that might cast doubt on Freeh’s overall OPINION? Surely you can tell us specifically what those things are right now since they're not contained in the work product. No?
Here’s what I think. I believe your review was less than “very very thorough” and it’s clear at least to me that you went into this with the preconceived notion that the Freeh OPINION wasn’t supported by the evidence without even taking a look at it. Hell, that was the platform you ran on for trustee and you were hell bent on proving Freeh wrong so please don’t tell me otherwise. When people go into things with preconceived notions they tend to rationalize things that fits their narrative and that’s what I think your’re doing here to save face.
The Court Order required the University to produce to us, not at the law firm of Saul Ewing, ALL of the Source Materials. However, that would necessitate a review by PSU Counsel of these same documents (no, they haven’t reviewed the vast majority of those documents) in order to mark them either Priviledged and Confidential or just Confidential.
This approach would be very costly to the University and quite honestly unnecessary as we had no need to review every single page for reasons I cannot disclose— yet.
Instead, we agreed to a Stipulation and Order in which all the Source Materials were made available to us electronically in the luxury of wherever and whenever we wanted to see them.
All documents were to be treated as Confidential. In the event that we wanted a hard copy of a document, we would request said document. The University through its outside counsel at Saul Ewing would then review such documents and mark them either Confidential or Priviledged and Confidential before sending to us electronically.
As for our approach, we had the benefit of an experienced team of lawyers, researchers and dedicated staff.
Alice Pope and I spent thousands of hours literally reading and reviewing materials. The balance of the Plaintiff Trustees supported us as needed.
Alice is largely responsible for crafting the report. Her expertise as a researcher were invaluable to this project.
Mary Waldman aided us immensely with her ability to search the database and find materials. We will be indebted to Mary forever.
Larry Schultz gave us an investigative perspective that helped us assess the manner in which the Freeh investigation was conducted.
The team at Myers Brier & Kelly, LLP provided tremendous legal guidance.
My educational background is in accounting. I am a CPA (though my license is Inactive) with experience in internal and external audits.
The approach was very simple. We reviewed the Source Materials from two perspectives.
First from the Freeh Report we worked backwards to confirm the Source Materials supported the report.
Second, from the Source Materials we worked to confirm they met the “more reasonable to conclude” standard used by Freeh.
This was a thorough, painstaking review. We spent days, nights and weekends looking at these Source Materials.
Remember, much of the work done by the Freeh Group focused on the interviews of the 430 people Freeh publicly claims to have interviewed. We had no need to re-interview those people.
Also keep in mind that we had available extensive contemporaneous materials from other legal proceedings that helped us in our review.
I hope to one day elaborate much more.
