New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella may owe his career to Gov. Chris Sununu, but that doesn’t stop him from prosecuting Associate Supreme Court Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi, according to a ruling released Wednesday.
Merrimack Superior Court Judge Martin Honigberg denied Hantz Marconi’s motion to remove Formella from the case and to dismiss all the charges against her, saying she hasn’t shown evidence that Formella’s conflict of interest is anything other than speculative.
“Even assuming AG Formella owes much of his legal career to Gov. Sununu, the Court is not convinced that such a history requires disqualification without a factual basis to support a showing that AG Formella has been or will be unable to perform his statutorily mandated duty to remain impartial given his personal relationship with the governor,” Honigberg wrote.
Richard Guerriero, one of Hantz Marconi’s lawyers along with Jonathan Motlier and Oliver Bloom, said they may appeal Honigberg’s ruling.
“We respectfully disagree with the judge’s decision and we may appeal it at some point. However, this was a preliminary issue arising in the earliest stages of the case. Rest assured, we will continue to fight the attorney general’s accusations on every lawful basis until Justice Hantz Marconi is vindicated,” Guerriero said in a statement.
Hantz Marconi is accused of trying to intervene with Sununu and Pease Development Authority Board Chair Steve Duprey on behalf of her husband, Ports Director Geno Marconi, who is currently under criminal investigation. Marconi is charged with releasing private driver records and destroying evidence in his separate case.
Formella has long been associated with Sununu, working as his private attorney before Sununu ran for governor, serving on his transition team, and later as his counsel in office. Unlike most states where attorneys general are elected by the public, New Hampshire’s is nominated by the governor.
Hantz Marconi’s lawyers argued to the court that Formella’s relationship with Sununu, and Sununu’s role as a key witness in the criminal case against Hantz Marconi, present a disqualifying conflict. They wanted a special prosecutor appointed and the criminal indictments thrown out, since Hantz Marconi claims a potentially biased prosecution team presented evidence to the grand jury.
But Sununu said during press questions following Wednesday’s Executive Council meeting that Formella goes to the “nth degree” to make sure politics stay out of prosecutions. He also pushed back on an NHPR report showing he was at an April meeting with Formella, Duprey, and other members of the PDA board before Geno Marconi was suspended and the criminal investigation started. Sununu had previously claimed he knew nothing about the case.
“I think that article was complete garbage. I meet with the attorney general all the time. The fact that I had a meeting with the attorney general, (that) it somehow implies that there was something, some other part of the discussion that wasn’t being disclosed, is complete nonsense and awful reporting by (NHPR’s Todd Bookman). It was completely unnecessary and inappropriate,” Sununu said.
He also made it clear there are two separate cases — Geno Marconi and questions about his actions at Pease, and Hantz Marconi and her alleged actions on her husband’s behalf.
“Justice Marconi is very different from the Geno issue, which is what this (story) was about. I know I’ve never talked to an investigator about that,” Sununu said.
“Put it this way, the attorney general has never questioned me,” he added.
Geno Marconi clashed with the Pease Development Board over a proposed Rye Harbor development that Sununu backed. While the board and Sununu supported spending $1 million in federal money on a raised shopping area at the harbor, Marconi and his co-defendant Brad Cook opposed the plan. The PDA backed off the plan in September following push back from the community.
Geno Marconi is accused of leaking private information of an individual known as N.L. in the indictments. It’s believed that N.L. is Neil Levesque, PDA vice chair and the executive director of the New Hampshire Institute for Politics at Saint Anselm College.
Levesque was at the April meeting with Formella, Sununu, and the rest of the board.
Soon after Geno Marconi was placed on leave, Hantz Marconi was forced to recuse herself from Supreme Court cases involving the Department of Justice. Frustrated with sitting out important decisions, Hantz Marconi scheduled a meeting with Sununu to discuss the issue, according to court records.
Before she met with Sununu, Hantz Marconi discussed the matter with Chief Justice Gordan MacDonald, who was the attorney general before Formella. MacDonald reportedly told Hantz Marconi there would be nothing illegal or inappropriate in talking to Sununu.
“I think you can do that—You are a constituent and have concerns,” MacDonald told her, according to court records.
