Hot Mike
Loose lips, public records tampering, and general fuckery
Last Friday, I was zoom-attending an Oregon State Bar public meeting, when out of nowhere, the Bar’s CFO Mike Williams suddenly confused me with disgraced former attorney Lori Deveny.
To be clear: I’m not a lawyer, I didn’t steal $4 million from personal injury clients, and I’m not sitting in an Arizona prison — Deveny is.
She’s been described by prosecutors as “the single worst thing to ever happen to Oregon’s legal community,” and she has cost the Bar at least $1.2 million, mostly in direct payouts to her victims, but much more than that in terms of credibility and respect.
So, it’s pretty strange that Mr. Williams would confuse anyone with Deveny, least of all me — the only journalist still reporting on her crimes and the Bar’s desperate efforts to cushion her landing.
Yet after realizing his error, it took him almost 3 full seconds to get my name out of his mouth and Deveny’s into it… he even needed help remembering it.
That was crazy and distressing enough, but just a few hours later it was made worse when another Bar staffer, Nik Chourey, got busted concealing a public record that I had requested, and lying about it to the Oregon Department of Justice.
That record was a press release the Bar issued about Lori Deveny in 2018. It’s quite strange that they’d work so hard to conceal that from me, because it was evidence of them kinda-sorta doing their jobs, albeit several months too late.
Who knows what goes on in those heads of theirs, but when they pull this kind of move, it calls into question the results of ever public record request I’ve ever made to the Bar, every document they claim doesn’t exist, every amount of money they’ve ever charged me, etc.
And who knows how many other members of the media and the public that they’ve done this to. Probably a lot.
The last straw came later in the meeting when Bar President Lee Ann Donaldson gaslighted a Deveny victim while making numerous false representations — that’s legalese for “she’s lying.”
Long story short, the Bar has now thrice-refused to pay out one legitimate Deveny victim, Alex Smith, for a myriad of strange reasons, but now because the Bar states that it is procedurally impossible to “reconsider” Mr. Smith’s twice-denied claim, and that the agency cannot “break its own rules” to pay him. For good measure, the Bar also states that the “time has run” out for any other Deveny victims to file such financial claims.
That is plainly false, no matter how many times Bar President Lee Ann Donaldson or CEO Helen Hierschbiel repeat it.
In fact, according to their own rules, the time to file a financial claim with the Bar only just began in April 2023, when Deveny was convicted, sentenced, and ordered to pay $4 million in restitution to her victims. Again, the time begins when a victim has a court order in hand.
Mr. Smith’s claim — filed with such a court order in hand — was the only claim that was properly and timely filed, but remains the only claim that was denied. On the flip side, the Bar rushed to pay out 41 other claims that were legitimate, but filed before the victims had any court order.
I can only imagine how distressing it is for Mr. Smith to be singled out like that — by a state agency! — and doubly-victimized by Oregon’s legal community, when literally everyone else got paid.
It’s repulsive, actually, the amount of energy Donaldson and the Bar are putting into protecting their own pocketbooks and mental health while working so energetically to damage those of Mr. Smith… and basically anyone else who gets in their way or dares to scrutinize their conduct.
There’s not much more to say, except that I’m going to contact all of the 90 or so remaining Deveny victims who have yet to file a financial claim, so that the Oregon State Bar can continue to inexplicably, monstrously, and publicly tell those victims — of the “worst thing ever to happen to Oregon’s legal community” — that they can go **** themselves.
