Here it is. It's damning, and the most powerful statement yet:
We hope that Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) and the University of Virginia have the spine to repudiate Mr. Cuccinelli's abuse of the legal code. If they do not, the quality of Virginia's universities will suffer for years to come.
Importantly, the Post makes the point that there is no serious evidence to justify the inquiry. You would have to have good reasons for suspecting Mann of fraud; merely disagreeing with his results certainly doesn't suffice. But there is no good reason for suspecting Mann of fraud--misreading emails and taking them out of context does not constitute any such thing. Every inquiry that has looked closely and seriously into ClimateGate has found that there's no there there. Or as the Post recaps:
For Mr. Cuccinelli's "investigation" to have any merit, the attorney general must suppose that Mr. Mann "knowingly" presented "a false or fraudulent claim for payment or approval." Mr. Cuccinelli's justification for this suspicion seems to be a series of e-mails that surfaced last year in which Mr. Mann wrote of a "trick" he used in one of his analyses, a term that referred to a method of presenting data to non-experts, not an effort to falsify results. IN FACT, the scientific community, including a National Academy of Sciences panel, has pored over Mr. Mann's work for more than a decade, and though supporters and skeptics still disagree on much, it's clear that his conclusions are not obviously, premeditatedly fraudulent, particularly since they come with admissions about the uncertainties inherent to his work. Inquiries in Britain and one at Pennsylvania State University, Mr. Mann's current academic home, also absolved him of wrongdoing with regard to the e-mail controversy, the latter noting in particular that there is no evidence that he "suppressed or falsified data."
Read the whole Post editorial here
. Hat tip: Adam Siegel
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