Government officials love a roundtable.
Here’s how they usually go: reporters get invited for the beginning, the host offers opening remarks, the key guests take turns thanking the host for having them and advocating for the issue at hand. Then the press gets ushered out so the “real talk” can begin without pesky reporters reporting on every detail.
So what actually happens once the door closes? On Thursday, I flew to Columbia, South Carolina, to find out.
There, the DOJ’s Fraud Division hosted a roundtable with eight U.S. attorney’s offices, seven state attorneys general, five federal law enforcement partners, and more than 50 state officials from seven southeastern states.
They’d come to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, entering them into a data-sharing partnership that gives the DOJ access to “publicly available corporate registration and public benefits payment data held by these state agencies.” The idea is that pooling it will help the department spot fraud patterns faster.
Before any of this was announced to reporters at a press conference, those 50-plus officials packed into a cavernous conference room for the “real talk.” I was the only reporter in it.