Phillip McHugh talks about his 2015 D.C. police case with Cleveland city workers. A similar session with the Editorial Board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer made clear that McHugh lied about the case. He resigned Thursday.

Not too long ago, news organizations were loath to call a newsmaker’s false statements lies, but then again, time was that when a politician was caught lying, he or she owned up to it.

In two stories in the past week, we talked about official lies. One was at Cleveland City Hall, and the other was at the Statehouse. In both cases we use the word “lie.” Today’s column explains why.

In the Cleveland case, I’m talking about Phillip McHugh, Mayor Justin Bibb’s college roommate who was hired into a newly created No. 3 role in the city’s Public Safety Department. After he was hired, WEWS-TV broke the story about him being Bibb’s roommate who, as a Washington D.C. cop, was at the center of a civil rights case that cost his employer a six-figure settlement. 

We followed the channel 5 story with our own and asked the mayor’s office for an explanation, but they weren’t talking. The D.C. case was ugly, with McHugh, a then-young white police detective, abysmally harassing a mid-70s Black couple over a seemingly absurd report about a gun threat. 

After we published our story, our Editorial Board called for the immediate discharge of McHugh. So did several City Council members. Cleveland has a history of civil rights abuses by police, making McHugh the wrong guy for the job.

Bibb then arranged for his chief of staff, Bradford Davy, interim Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond and McHugh to visit with the Editorial Board, so we could hear McHugh’s side of the story. McHugh came across as quite earnest in the session, explaining repeatedly that he pursued the case against the Black couple against his own wishes. He portrayed himself as someone forced by prosecutors to keep going after them.

Editorial Board member and columnist Eric Foster saw flaws in McHugh’s account and grilled him, which resulted in McHugh saying we were missing necessary context and should read the case file in the civil rights lawsuit. We did, and McHugh’s deposition – taken under oath – was a completely different version than what he told us. In his deposition, he stated clearly that he believed the victim’s account about the gun threat and sought warrants from prosecutors, who he said agreed with him. It was the opposite of prosecutors making him pursue a case in which he did not believe.

Beyond the diametrically opposed statements, several prosecutors noted that his claims made no sense. Police work independent of prosecutors. They don’t take direction from them. The only reason a detective goes to a prosecutor is to get a warrant. If they don’t want a warrant, they don’t go to the prosecutor. Yet McHugh said he went to prosecutors with his evidence and asked them to deny his warrants. It just doesn’t work that way.

When confronted with the conflicts, McHugh told reporter Courtney Astolfi that both of his accounts were true. That’s simply not possible. Either he lied to us, or he lied under oath in his deposition. So, we didn’t mince words. We said he lied. He resigned Thursday.

In the second case, at the Statehouse, we were talking about the failure of the Legislature to pass simple legislation to ensure Joe Biden appears on the November ballot in Ohio. Lawmakers years ago set an unusually early deadline for locking down the Ohio ballot – sometimes, before the political conventions make their official nominations. Lawmakers several times over the years have had to pass laws making exceptions to the ballot deadline for presidential candidates.

This year, only the Democratic convention is beyond the deadline, but Senate President Matt Huffman and House Speaker Jason Stephens – both Republicans -- assured Ohioans they would pass the simple legislation to extend the deadline.

Then they did not.

On our Today in Ohio podcast, which is a weekday discussion by editors about the top stories of the day, we talked about the failure. And we said that either Huffman and Stephens are incompetent buffoons who cannot do something so basic as pass a simple law, or they are liars who never intended to. 

I don’t know which is worse. 

What I do know is that we are surrounded these days by politicians and leaders who lie. That’s relatively new. As recently as 15 years ago, leaders did not want to be called liars. The Plain Dealer newsroom was a partner for several years with PolitiFact, which assesses political statements for truth, with the worse lies being rated “Pants on Fire.” Political leaders hated that rating when we used it and we believe to this day that the repeated Pants-on-Fire ratings for Josh Mandel in the 2012 U.S. Senate race is one reason he lost so badly to incumbent Sherrod Brown.

Step forward a dozen years, and we’re surrounded by lies. Donald Trump was caught in thousands of them, which seems to have freed many politicians to lie without reserve. Americans appear to have become so numb to all the lying that they just accept it.

Our job, though, is to call them out. 

So, we do.

I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com

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