Lawyers for Associate Supreme Court Justice Anna Barbara Hantz-Marconi say the state’s key witness, former Gov. Chris Sununu, doesn’t think she committed any crime.
Hantz-Marconi is charged with felonies for allegedly trying to get Sununu to end the criminal investigation targeting her husband, Ports Director Geno Marconi, during a June 6 meeting in Sununu’s office.
But in a bombshell filing made public Monday night, Hantz-Marconi’s lawyers say new evidence demands the criminal charges against the sitting justice be dismissed. According to the transcripts filed with Hantz-Marconi’s motion, Sununu told investigators she never tried to get him to interfere in the criminal investigation.
“No, there was no ask, there was nothing, ‘Governor, I wish you could do this,’ or there was nothing like that,” Sununu said according to the transcript. “She was expressing frustration. Clearly not asking me to do anything.”
Defense lawyers Richard Guerriero and Jonathan Kotlier filed the transcripts Friday in Merrimack Superior Court as part of their effort to have the charges dismissed. The attorneys previously filed a motion to dismiss the charges for lack of a crime, to which the state objected. However, the state provided the transcripts to the defense before a decision on the dismissal was made. Guerriero and Kotlier say the state has essentially now proven there was no crime.
“[N]ow that discovery has been produced, it is clear that the defense was exactly right to ask the court to dismiss the indictments because they do not state any crime and because there is nothing in discovery which would inform a bill of particulars or an amended indictment such that the state could allege a crime,” Guerriero and Kotlier wrote.
Hantz-Marconi is currently on leave from the Supreme Court and has agreed to have her law license suspended pending the outcome of the criminal case. She maintains she never crossed any legal or ethical lines when talking to Sununu, an assertion seemingly backed by Sununu’s own words.
“I, I didn’t get the sense that, I didn’t get the sense that anything was illegal about the conversation,” Sununu told investigators. “No, I mean about halfway through the conversation I kept waiting, is she gonna ask me for something, or for something, or to do something, like and even imply that I should, ‘Governor, you need to dah, dah, dah,’ no, never came. So there’s technically no ask of me.”
Present at the June 6 meeting with Sununu and Hantz-Marconi was Rudy Ogden, Sununu’s then-legal counsel. Ogden also told investigators that the judge never asked Sununu to get involved in her husband’s investigation.
“[T]hat’s why I say in terms of her not asking for anything, it – it never was, it never went more than saying this needs to end quickly…Like it was never, ‘it needs to end quickly, and geez, if you talk to them, you should tell them that, or this needs to end quickly, and I think you can do that.’ It was never anything like that,” Ogden told investigators.
Geno Marconi was placed on leave from his position as Ports Director in April while the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation. That pending investigation forced Hantz-Marconi to recuse herself from hearing cases involving the Department of Justice, a significant part of the caseload for the Supreme Court.
Her frustration at sitting out 20 to 25 percent of the cases led her to speak to Sununu, according to statements filed in court. Hantz-Marconi has previously disclosed she first cleared the potential ethical problems of the meeting with Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, who told her she had a right to talk to the governor about her concerns.
She is also accused of trying to get Pease Development Authority Chair Steven Duprey to intervene in her husband’s suspension, an accusation Duprey denied when he spoke to investigators, according to the Friday filing.
“According to Duprey, Justice Hantz Marconi ‘was calling, obviously, because I’m a friend.’”
Duprey told the investigators Hantz-Marconi understood he had no say in the investigation, and she never asked him to get involved. Instead she wanted to vent about the difficulties she was facing as a result of her husband’s legal troubles, Duprey said.
“I think she was very appropriate in not trying to cross the line,” Duprey said.
Geno Marconi was indicted last October along with Brad Cook, the chairman of the Division of Ports and Harbors Advisory Council and a longtime fishing boat captain. They are accused of crimes involving leaking information about an unnamed victim to further an unstated motive.
Marconi illegally provided Cook with the confidential driving records of another person, known in the indictments as N.L., according to the indictments, and believed to be PDA Vice Chair Neil Levesque.
Marconi also is alleged to have deleted a voicemail in order to hinder any investigation, the indictments state. Cook, for his part, is accused of lying to the grand jury when questioned about N.L.’s driving records.
