Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Wolf will not release report on Lt. Gov. Stack, wife

- By Liz Navratil and Angela Couloumbis

HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Wolf said Tuesday that he won’t make public an internal report on whether Lt. Gov. Mike Stack and his wife had mistreated state employees, saying he did not want to compound the family’s ordeal as Mr. Stack’s wife receives mental health treatment.

“I’m not going to release it,” Mr. Wolf said. “My concern back in the summer was to make sure the employees, police officers, the staff of the residence were safe and were not in a bad job situation.”

Mr. Wolf, a Democrat, said he thought that he “took care of that.” The governor stripped the two of their Pennsylvan­ia State Police security details and scaled back staffing at the taxpayer-funded residence that Mr. Stack, also a Democrat, shares with his wife, Tonya.

“I don’t think anything’s to be served by piling on top of that, and also have a concern: I think I need to be fair to Mrs. Stack, who, I think, is still undergoing treatment,” Mr. Wolf

said. “I don’t see any reason togo any further than I did.”

Last spring, Mr. Wolf directedth­e Office of Inspector General to investigat­e whether the Stacks verbally abused and mistreated the state troopers assigned to protect them and the state employees who work at the lieutenant governor’s official residence.

At the time, Mr. Wolf said he would consider making public the final report by Inspector General Bruce Beemer but stopped short of committing to it.

As that inquiry unfolded, Mr. Wolf took the extraordin­ary step of stripping the Stacks of the state police protection Pennsylvan­ia’s lieutenant governors have been given for decades. The governor also sharply scaled back staffing at Mr. Stack’s official residence, saying employees would be dispatched there only at arranged times and only under supervisio­n.

Amid the controvers­y, Mr. Stack held a news conference in his office, during which he apologized, acknowledg­ing that he sometimes gets stressed and angry and lapses into what he called a “Stack moment.” But he declined to describe the behavior for which he was apologizin­g or discuss his treatment of employees in any detail.

In late spring, Mr. Stack’s office confirmed that Tonya Stack had entered an in-patient facility to deal with a mental health issue.

 ??  ?? Lt. Gov. Mike Stack
Lt. Gov. Mike Stack

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