Inside the investigation: Follow the documents
When a newspaper publishes an investigative story and uncovers facts that others tried to keep hidden, how can a reader know what is real and what isn’t?
Investigative journalism is not about publishing rumours. It is about reporting the facts.
It’s why investigations can take months to produce a single story, why reporters spend late nights fact checking, doing interviews, and poring over thousands of pages of documents.
This tedious and grinding process is how The Standard was able to publish All the Chair’s Men on July 26, a story that showed regional CAO Carmen D’Angelo, while applying for his job in 2016, downloaded memos written by the staff of Regional Chair Alan Caslin that breached confidentiality and fairness rules governing the hiring process.
The documents, written by Caslin’s policy director Robert D’Amboise and Caslin’s thencommunications director Jason Tamming, contained confidential information about other candidates along with interview questions and answers.
D’Amboise is still in Caslin’s office while Tamming has been promoted to the director of corporate communications at the Region.
In keeping with the trust in journalism initiative started by The Standard’s parent company, TorStar, we are giving readers another look inside our investigation.
Our initial expose, published April 6, showed D’Angelo downloaded a memo containing confidential candidate information written by D’Amboise.
Following the publication of that story, regional council hired lawyer Marvin Huberman to investigate. Huberman cleared the process of wrong doing, but didn’t obtain digital evidence and accepted “improbable” statements from D’Angelo as credible.
Council declared the matter closed. The Standard kept digging.
Several sources said there was more to the story. We just had to follow the documents.
Through a whistle-blower, I accessed hundreds of documents. Most were mundane but buried in the data, sporting titles like “Questions (Revised)”, “Messaging” and “JT Q&A Suggestions,” were some smoking guns.
Digital information embedded in these documents, along with other digital data, verified the documents were written by D’Amboise and Tamming and downloaded by D’Angelo prior to his final interview.
D’Amboise had written three memos in total — two containing candidate information and one listing the CAO interview questions — information candidates for the job should not have.
(While we published the interview questions memos, The Standard has chosen to not publish the candidate memos because those candidates were promised confidentiality by the Region and spoke to The Standard on the condition we would not publish their names. Similarly, we are not revealing the identities of whistler blowers who could face professional blow-black for providing information to a journalist.)
D’Angelo’s possession of the D’Amboise documents raises questions about the legitimacy of the hiring process, but they don’t contain information showing they were written specifically for D’Angelo.
The Tamming Q&A memo is a different animal entirely.
The memo contains answers to five questions D’Angelo was asked to address by the firm running the CAO recruiting process, The Phelps Group, in a written submission to be presented to the hiring committee at his final interview. The Phelps Group provided The Standard with the questions sent to D’Angelo.
In the memo, Tamming also suggests how experience at Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority could be used to answer interview questions — information specifically relevant to D’Angelo, who was the NPCA CAO at the time. No other CAO candidate was an NPCA employee.
The chain of evidence didn’t end there. During the course of the investigation, I obtained D’Angelo’s written submission and compared it to the Tamming memo and the Phelps document.
The questions in the Phelps document are the same questions answered in the Tamming memo, and those answers were used, sometimes nearly verbatim, in D’Angelo’s submission.
All of these pieces of evidence point to a tainted hiring process.
There are many outstanding questions, including what Caslin knew and when he knew it. So far, he won’t answer questions and told The Standard the matter was closed.
We’ll keeping digging.