Dean of NE legislature slams AG, Gov. for GOP coverup of Kintner sex video on state laptop

Chambers, with his poodle, on a reelection billboard after his
term limit timeout. Governor Rickett's poodle, Bill Kintner,
may be on the way to the pound.

The longest-serving member of the Nebraska Unicameral, Ernie Chambers, has vowed to initiate an impeachment vote against GOP firebrand Bill Kinter, a state senator from the Omaha suburb of Papillion, now embroiled in a sex-video-on-a-government-computer scandal.
     That, if successful, would need 25 votes. Chambers is writing the impeachment resolution now and will introduce it if Kintner doesn't resign between now and the start of the next session of Nebraska's Unicameral. If the impeachment resolution fails, Chambers will seek a vote to expel Kintner, which takes 30 votes. From the Omaha World-Herald:

NE AG Doug Peterson has been far too busy suing Colorado
over its pot laws and everybody else over gay marriage and
transgender access to bathrooms to worry much about the
sleazy abuse of state property by a conservative
fellow Republican

     Chambers criticized both Gov. Ricketts and Attorney General Doug Peterson for failing to act decisively in the year since evidence of this scandal emerged. He said Ricketts should have demanded to know whether Kintner had misused state resources and insisted that he resign if there was evidence of such misuse.
     “I believe there was a determination on the part of the governor and the attorney general which, in my opinion, seems to smack of the Republicans circling the wagons to protect a very loud member of their party,” he said.
     Pushing for Kintner’s resignation would not breach the separation of powers because it would not amount to disciplining a senator, Chambers said.
     Kintner, a Republican, is a key ally of Ricketts. Kintner also is married to Lauren Kintner, who leads Ricketts’ policy research office.

Excuses for doing nothing abound:

• Governor Ricketts says he was prohibited by law from discussing an ongoing investigation by the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission (NDAC) . However, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, Vince Powers, an attorney, says Ricketts was perfectly free to discuss the underlying facts of the case but chose not to inform the public for a year. During that time, Kintner worked hard to advance the governor's political agenda in the Unicameral.
• Sen. Bob Krist, the Legislature's Executive Board chairman, said when he discovered that a woman was trying to sell a sexually explicit video she said involved Kintner, he and Speaker Galen Hadley decided  Ricketts' office should handle it because Kintner's wife works for the governor. (Lauren Kintner has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.)
• Nebraska AG Doug Peterson, also a conservative Republican, has offered no explanation for his relative inaction and dead silence for over a year.
• The World-Herald says the Nebraska State Patrol completed its investigation in October of 2015 and and turned over the results to the Attorney General’s Office, which "reviewed" the information and quietly referred the matter to the (NADC)  in November. Since then, the NADC has met four times (Dec ’15, Jan ’16, April ’16 and June ’16) and taken no action in the matter
• The Nebraska State Patrol seems to have been running interference for Senator Kintner. Sen. Krist said a state IT worker sought him out because he felt he had been interrogated by Kintner and the patrol about the Legislature’s security system on senator email accounts.

  

  Ricketts appointee, Nebraska
  State Patrol Col. Brad Rice

       Krist said he met with Patrol Col. Brad Rice after the incident, and Rice agreed that the State Patrol breached protocol, and that the IT worker should’ve been represented by legal counsel.     
       This week, Krist told the World-Herald that "he asked the State Patrol to keep him informed of its findings, and when he inquired about the investigation two to three months ago, the State Patrol told him the investigation was ongoing and that it couldn’t talk to him about it." But in the same article, the World-Herald noted that the State Patrol "completed its investigation in October 2015."

• A "junior senator" (rumored to be Lincoln's Adam Morfeld) told Krist about an online solicitation he received to buy the compromising video of Bill Kintner. Krist advised him to take his information to the State Patrol, which Morfeld allegedly did, saying nothing to the public