Congrats to former governor Peter Shumlin, who will be spared the indignity — and potential legal peril — of testifying under oath about the EB-5 scandal, thanks to the state’s universal settlement of lawsuits by investors in the fraudulent scheme.

Regrets for the rest of us, who’ve been wondering for years what he knew and when he knew it

At the same time, hopes arise for the fullest possible disclosure of documents hitherto barred from public disclosure because of the state’s legal exposure. Well, that threat has been removed, right? So now we can expect a big press conference any day now where state officials will pull a curtain away from a mountain of documents and eliminate all the suspicions.

Right?

I mean, look here.

The withheld documents, Spottswood said, have been determined to be relevant to litigation in the investors’ pending case and therefore have not been released.

That’s from a January article by VTDigger’s Alan Keays about the news outlet’s failure to force disclosure of all relevant EB-5 documents. “Spottswood” was Eleanor Spottswood of the Attorney General’s office, arguing for the state and against disclosure. Well, that obstacle has been removed.

On the other hand, you’ve got Attorney General Charity Clark saying that the settlement “gives Vermont the opportunity to move forward from this chapter.” That sounds like the next step is memory-holing, not examination.

I’m sorry, but I’m not ready to “move forward from this chapter” until I get a chance to read and comprehend the chapter. We need to understand the past lest we be doomed to repeat it.

In fact, if Clark’s office manages to devise a new pretext to bury the documents, it’ll be hard to avoid concluding that partisan shenanigans are at work. Clark’s a Dem. So is Shumlin. And a bunch of the administration toadi officials involved are still on the scene in some capacity or other — up to and including Democratic Treasurer Michael Pieciak, widely seen as a future gubernatorial candidate. Oh look, here’s Alan Keays again:

In the years before federal regulators swooped in and shut down the development projects based around Jay Peak Resort, Pieciak was serving as deputy commissioner of the state Department of Financial Regulation. 

By some accounts, he played a key role in untangling a complex fraud that the feds later referred to as a “Ponzi-like scheme.” But according to his critics, Pieciak’s failure to take quick action cost foreign investors hundreds of millions of dollars and left them without the green cards, or permanent U.S. residency, they were seeking through their investments.

“Failure to take quick action” is one of many potential sins of the Shumlin administration around EB-5. Others range from aiding and abetting fraud to a studied Sergeant Schultz attitude toward possible shenanigans, to simply being too stupid to be a Maplefields cashier, let alone manage a powerful state agency.

I mean, look at the worst of the EB-5 schemes: The plan to site a huge, state-of-the-art biotech facility in, of all places, Newport — a nice town in a beautiful setting, but just about the last place on Earth you’d expect a cutting-edge global tech concern to put down roots. And of course the Korean firm supposedly planning the facility was so transparently phony, you could see the sun shining through its corporate papers. The Shumlin administration suspended its approval of the project in 2014 and launched an investigation in 2015, which might seem like sharp diligence except that back in in 2013, the parent company’s Seoul headquarters had been seized by creditors and sold at a public auction.

So yeah, there are plenty of questions about the Shumlin administration’s oversight of EB-5, which more closely resemble the actions of a cheerleader than a regulator. It would have been highly instructive to get Shumlin and his former officials on the record and under oath, but that won’t happen now. The release of every single damn document will serve as an acceptable substitute. Nothing less will do.