In his letter to the group’s leader Greg Cruz, Deputy Attorney General Gregory Baka said: “I can assure you, there was no intention by the lt. governor, director of personnel, public information officer, or anyone else to ‘set up’ Taotao Tano…. Rather, what occurred seems to be the unfortunate result of a failure to consult legal counsel at the [AG’s office] before attempting to issue documents intended to be legally binding.
On behalf of the CNMI government, Baka said “I would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused by the oversight of the director of personnel in assigning to Taotao Tano a building that was already assigned to the Office of the Attorney General.”
But according to Cruz, Taotano Tano will continue to occupy the office space because they believe that the permission they received from the Office of Personnel Management is “legally binding.”
Cruz added that they will also pursue their criminal trespass complaint against the AGO for “irresponsibly entering our office without our notification, permission, and acknowledgement, without cause or a warrant of any kind.”
In his letter to Cruz on May 29, Gov. Benigno R. Fitial rescinded the facility assigned to Taotao Tano because the “building has been assigned to the Office of the Attorney General for decades, and is currently used by the OAG for storing certain physical evidence.”
The governor said should available commonwealth resources permit the assignment of government property to non-profit organizations in the future, “the government will certainly keep Taotao Tano group in mind, consistent with applicable provisions of law.”
Cruz, who has been critical of Fitial, told Baka that the AGO’s apology “basically is notifying us of the incompetence and ignorance of the OPM director, the housing officer and the lt. governor, for not knowing or understanding the proper steps, guidelines or procedures in the assignment of government facilities to private non-profit organizations — or it could be that you are now insinuating that this was a political move or under the table type of transaction.”
How could it be possible for the AGO to use the building for decades, Cruz added, when the OPM director and housing officer indicated that the last tenant was the then-public information officer of the Commonwealth Utilities Corp., Pamela Mathis.
“It was a mistake that the members of Taotao Tano stumbled into something highly critical such as the security and mishandling of vital pieces of evidence on a pending case left neglected and abandoned by the Attorney General’s Office, otherwise all of you would not be concentrating so much on Taotao Tano,” Cruz said in a letter to Baka.
