Yes! misses the point on Holder/Abuzuaiter confrontations

GREENSBORO, NC -- With the Rhino Times gone (although rumored to be coming back on October 3rd), the remaining local weekly has a real opportunity to fill the vacuum on election coverage. It looks like they are not going to take it.

In addition to the silly mistake of identifying Greensboro's mayor as "Robbie Knight" (a concatenation of the current and previous mayors) today, a (justifiably) unsigned editorial completely misses the point of at-large city council candidate Ben Holder's recent attention to at-large incumbent Marikay Abuzuaiter.

While Yes!'s editorial reminds us of their stories last winter (here and here) about emails that revealed Greensboro Police identifying Abuzuaiter as a confidential informant and appearing to show Abuzuaiter sending information to the police, that has not been the meat of Ben Holder's gripe. As Holder has made clear in his two recent appearances before City Council to speak to the issue, his interest is in having Abuzuater reconcile her statements of denial surrounding those emails with the facts.

When confronted with emails appearing to be sent from her AOL account to the police reporting on the activities of groups such as Occupy Greensboro and the local Tea Party, Abuzuaiter denied sending them, according to Yes! Weekly reporter Eric Ginsburg. This incongruence prompted people to wonder if there shouldn't then be an investigation into how emails could be sent to the police from a council person's email account without her sending them.

Respected local attorney Lewis Pitts even went to a city council meeting to demand an investigation.



Abuzuaiter's "explanations" have thus far included protestations that she couldn't have taken the pictures included with some of the emails because her only camera was on a cell phone that she says was broken at the time; that she couldn't have accessed her AOL account at the time of the emails because her computer suffered a "blue screen of death;" that someone must have impersonated her because she doesn't sign her name the way it appeared on the emails in question; and that she wasn't even a council person when the emails in question were sent (not accurate).

When confronted with the possibility that the police may have "framed" her, she said "time will tell."

But time will not tell. Not on its own. Not without an investigation that Abuzuatier has not called for and which, although requested by citizens, the city has declined to undertake.

Abuzuaiter now says the issue has been "resolved," but the public remains as much in the dark as when Yes! first reported the story. It is this failure of a sitting council person to explain herself to the public that Holder is insisting be addressed. It is not the matter of her being identified as a police informant or her sending information about peaceful assemblies to the police. Although those matter, the Yes! editorial misses Holder's larger point, that Abuzuaiter is avoiding giving the public a straight answer.

The issue is one of honesty, public accountability and can be illustrated in this question I emailed to Abuzuaiter eight days ago and to which she has not replied:

Did you send the emails you told Eric Ginsberg you did not send?