February 10, 2017 Government, In The News, Missouri, News, Puzder

Will Court Unseal Puzder’s Divorce Records?

By: Hassan A. Kanu, Bloomberg BNA, February 10, 2017

A Missouri state court will consider whether to unseal labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder’s divorce records next Tuesday, two days before his confirmation hearing on Feb. 16, the head of a government watchdog group told Bloomberg BNA.

A motion to seal the records was filed a day after President Donald Trump nominated Puzder, Dan Stevens, acting executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, said Feb. 9.

Stevens says the records should be unsealed.

~~~

“This is a person that would be charged with overseeing the entire American workforce as head of the Department of Labor and the types of things alleged against him are the sort of things millions of workers face in the workplace,” he said. “Press reports have alluded to the fact that these records exist, but the details and full records haven’t been available. We thought the public deserved to know.”

Stevens’ organization filed a petition Feb. 2 arguing that a Missouri law that allows public inspection of divorce records “for good cause” applies to Puzder’s case because information about his prior acts “are of high interest and concern to the members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee” and “the public at large.”

The group said Puzder acknowledged that he is now a public figure with less of a right to privacy when he accepted the nomination because that came with a requirement to “provide the U.S. Senate with considerable information that otherwise would remain private.”

Read the rest of the article here.