Ken Cuccinelli was looking for fraud, not witches.
The alarmist National Center for Science Education comments:
…Mann’s allies in the fight celebrated the ruling. Kent Willis of the ACLU of Virginia told the News Leader, “If academic freedom means anything, it is that scientists and other scholars should be able to communicate freely without fear that the government is looking over their shoulders”…
But academic freedom does not mean that government-funded researchers can commit fraud.
Read Steve Milloy’s Washington Times op-ed “Tree Ring Circus.”
The people backing Mann must have absolutely no faith in his work or ethics. Why else would they fight so dam hard to keep it all secret, while cheering on Gleick and his fiasco. look at their actions and it is obvious they are more worried about Mann’s stuff than global warming. They survived climategate…..so they must think (or know) that this stuff is Kryptonite to fight so hard to block it. Any skeptical gleicks willing to sacrifice their careers to obtain it?……..Oh thats right, skeptics are not devout enough for martyrdom.
Doing things “without fear that the government is looking over their shoulders” means getting away with anything.