Gracie Gato's Speakeasy Podcast

Correction :(Sun, Sept 6, 2016): This episode originally stated Robin Davis was elected Merrimack County Attorney in 2016. She was elected in 2018. It also referred to Gordon MacDonald as "suspended." He is on indefinite medical leave, which is not a disciplinary action. Both corrections have been made to reflect accurate reporting. We regret the errors.

Twelve hundred and six votes. That's the whole ballgame.In 2020, Merrimack County Attorney Robin Davis lost her re-election bid by a margin thin enough to walk a tightrope across. On the surface: an incumbent who dismantled her own sexual-assault unit, bled staff within months of taking office, and got sued by her own investigator for hostile work environment. Case closed, right?Not so fast.This episode follows the paper trail — the lawsuit, the workplace investigation, and a bombshell news story that landed in the Concord Patch days before the election — and lines it up against the same recurring cast of institutional names that keep surfacing across New Hampshire's advocacy and prosecutorial networks. Then it hands you the other side too: a competing analysis suggesting this was nothing more than a geographic split, not a scandal at all.Along the way: an eight-month stall on an election-fraud case that only moved once cameras showed up, a soon-to-be Chief Justice on record saying "we need to do better," and a question that refuses to resolve itself neatly — was Robin Davis voted out, or was she pushed?No verdicts here. Just the confirmed record, the unconfirmed hypothesis clearly labeled as such, and the invitation to follow the door that barely closed.Receipts over vibes. Always.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

Take two. Because the truth deserves better audio than we gave it the first time.

Full disclosure: our first crack at this interview got buried by a soundboard that had other plans — so we’re back, mics dialed in, and doing it right. Some stories are worth the do-over.

This time, Jon Raiche sits down with The Gracie Gato Podcast to talk about his run for Merrimack County Attorney. Raiche brings 26 years in criminal justice to the table — public defender work in Miami and Orlando, private practice in South Florida, and now 14 years as a prosecutor here at home. A native Granite Stater raising his own family in Boscawen, he’s making the case that Merrimack County needs a “day one ready” candidate — no learning curve, no on-the-job training, just someone who’s already seen the inside of the system from every angle.

We get into what he thinks is broken in the county’s justice system, where he stands on bail and mental health reform, and why he believes accountability starts with the County Attorney’s office being more visible, not less — open-door policies, public forums, the whole transparency pitch.

Receipts over vibes, as always — so tune in, and let’s see if the second take does this story justice.

Vote Jon Raiche. Sept 8th.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, a polling company got caught lying.

Median Strategies had released a poll showing Karen Bass with a twelve-point lead over Nithya Raman in the LA mayor’s race, picking up most of reality TV figure Spencer Pratt’s old support. It spread everywhere, because it was juicy, because it fit a narrative editors wanted to run. Then the company admitted the whole thing was fabricated — a “social experiment,” in their words, designed to test how a fake number could travel through the media ecosystem without anyone bothering to verify it first. The same firm had run an identical stunt in Wisconsin, showing a socialist gubernatorial candidate up twenty points. She lost her primary.

It was all fake, and it worked anyway, at least for a news cycle.

I keep coming back to that story not because Los Angeles is my beat, but because of what it proves: a fabricated number, dressed up as data, can move real votes if nobody checks it before it runs. New Hampshire likes to think of itself as immune to that kind of thing. We’re “First in the Nation.” We pride ourselves on being first to pass certain laws — including laws tied directly to elections and to how victims are treated inside the criminal justice system.

So I went looking for our own version of the Median Strategies story. I found one. It doesn’t involve a fake poll. It involves real phone calls, a real state filing, and an Attorney General’s office that spent a year building the talking points for a bill it was also supposed to be investigating complaints about.

The Calls

In the spring of 2018, New Hampshire state legislators started getting phone calls at home about a proposed constitutional amendment called Marsy’s Law — a victims’-rights measure that would eventually go to a House vote as CACR22.

State Representative Linda Kenison wrote to her entire caucus on April 25th, 2018. Her constituents, she said, had been called and told to contact her about the bill. The strategy backfired: once she explained what the amendment actually did, her constituents agreed with her position — against it. Her words, not mine: “I am getting increasingly angered by this deceitful practice.”

Two days later, that complaint didn’t stay inside the legislature. Amanda Grady Sexton, Director of Public Affairs for the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence — one of the organizations publicly supporting Marsy’s Law — forwarded Kenison’s entire email thread directly to Jane Young at the Attorney General’s office, asking her to route it to “the appropriate person.” Ten months later, WMUR reported the AG’s office was still investigating.

The People Writing the Answers

Here’s what nobody knew while that investigation was supposedly underway: months earlier, in January 2018, Sexton had already looped Jane Young into building the campaign’s public defense. Draft documents, response papers, coordination with Doug Beloof — Marsy’s Law’s own national policy advisor — all moving through the same channel. Beloof’s own cover note on one set of documents specified that the answers to public criticism were, in his words, “most of which were from the AG.”

A year later, in January 2019, Gordon MacDonald — then Attorney General, now Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court — was directly copied on an email about legislative strategy for a related victims’-rights bill, House Bill 705. That same email mentioned a national grant program from the National Crime Victim Law Institute, worth up to a million dollars, scored in part on how strong a state’s victims’-rights statutes were. The sender’s own word for it: “an incentive to keep up this important work.”

To be precise about what that document shows and what it doesn’t: it isn’t a literal quid pro quo. Nobody wrote “pass this bill and get this check.” What it shows is an Attorney General’s office actively shaping the legislative and public-messaging strategy for victims’-rights law, in the same breath as a grant opportunity explicitly framed as incentive to keep doing exactly that kind of work. Read that however you want. I’m just telling you what’s in the email.

The Money, Documented

This is the part I don’t have to characterize at all, because the state did it for me.

Marsy’s Law for New Hampshire filed its Statement of Receipts and Expenditures with the Secretary of State’s office on June 20th, 2018. Chairperson: Emilio Gonzalez. Treasurer: Andrew Biemer. Total receipts: $430,000.

Number of contributors: one.

Every dollar came from Henry Nicholas III of Aliso Viejo, California — listed occupation, “Philanthropist, Business Executive.” Five checks between February and May 2018: $50,000, $100,000, $100,000, $130,000, and $50,000. Not one New Hampshire dollar. Not one New Hampshire name on the receipts page. A California donor built this campaign, dollar for dollar, from three thousand miles away.

Now look at where the money went. Amanda Grady Sexton — the same Sexton coordinating messaging with the Attorney General’s office — was paid $15,000 in consulting fees on March 14th, $15,000 more on April 30th, and $15,000 more on May 17th. Forty-five thousand dollars in consulting fees alone, inside a single filing period, on top of separate reimbursements for food, travel, online advertising, and videography.

And Andrew Biemer — the campaign’s own Treasurer, the man whose signature is on the filing — paid himself $2,500 in consulting fees. Four separate times. Ten thousand dollars, from the account he was personally responsible for overseeing.

The Phones

Then there’s the line that made me stop scrolling.

June 7th, 2018. Paid to FLS Connect LLC, of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Amount: $49,686.94. Nature of expenditure: “Media - Phones.”

FLS Connect isn’t an obscure name if you follow political consulting — it’s a national phone-outreach firm, the kind of vendor campaigns hire when they need to make calls at scale.

I want to be exactly as careful here as the document allows me to be. The filing does not say this money paid for the specific calls Linda Kenison and her colleagues complained about. It doesn’t name the recipients, and I’m not going to imply it does. What I can tell you is the timing: in the same election cycle, during the same window state legislators were calling the calls they received “deceitful,” the Marsy’s Law campaign’s own state filing shows nearly fifty thousand dollars paid to a company whose entire business is making phone calls.

Maybe that’s coincidence. Maybe it’s the first time anyone’s put the complaint and the receipt in the same room. I’ll let you decide which.

Why This Matters Now

None of what’s above is a theory. It’s a signed, dated filing, received by the New Hampshire Department of State, sitting in public records the whole time. Nobody had to leak it. Nobody had to hack anything. It was always there, waiting for someone to actually read it against the legislators’ own emails from the same season.

That’s the real lesson from the Median Strategies story, and it’s the same lesson New Hampshire keeps almost teaching itself: institutions don’t self-report, and journalists don’t get credit for asking questions — they get credit for reading the documents nobody else bothered to pull.

As a new election season and legislative session come back around, this is exactly the moment to ask who’s calling your house, who’s writing the talking points defending the bill behind those calls, and who’s paying for both. New Hampshire likes to go first. It’s worth checking, every so often, what we’re actually leading on.

Receipts over vibes. Omnia Vincit Virtus.

Listen to the full episode of the Gracie Gato Podcast, “Behind the Curtain of Electioneering,” wherever you get your podcasts.

More RTK’s will be posted.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

Jason Gerhard spent twelve years in federal prison. Now he wants to run the county sheriff’s office.

That sentence alone should stop you mid-scroll — and that’s the point. On this episode of The Gracie Gato Podcast, I sit down with former State Representative Jason Gerhard, a convicted felon turned lawmaker turned two-time candidate for Merrimack County Sheriff, to talk about what happens when a system spits someone out and they decide to run for the front office instead of walking away.

We get into it: the prison sentence, the treatise he wrote behind bars calling out federal overreach, his fight to restore gun rights for people with records like his own, and his controversial vision of what a sheriff’s office could be if it took its independent, constitutional powers seriously. Agree with him or not — and I suspect you’ll land somewhere strong either way — Gerhard is a case study in what happens when “redeemable” runs headlong into “electable.”

No spin. No vibes. Just receipts, hard questions, and a conversation about power, punishment, and second acts in New Hampshire politics.

Listen now on The Gracie Gato Podcast — where we chase the paper trail, not the applause.

More on Jason Gerhard’s campaign: gohardwithgerhard.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

A few weeks ago, I told you about a chief justice who vanished into medical leave without explanation, two days after formal misconduct charges landed against a colleague he was a key witness against. I told you about two sworn statements — months apart — that cannot both be true.

This week, New Hampshire’s judiciary said something out loud it hadn’t said before: there’s no forecasted return date for Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald. Not “soon.” Not “under review.” Nothing. And in the same statement, the court admitted something I did not expect — even his fellow justices say they haven’t been told what’s actually wrong.

To be clear, and I mean this: he owes no one a diagnosis. That’s his right, full stop. But a right and its optics are different animals, and the optics here are getting harder to explain with a two-paragraph press release.

So this is a shorter one. A follow-up. Because the story didn’t end — it just went quiet, and quiet is sometimes the loudest thing in the room.

In this episode:

— What the court actually said this week, word for word, and what it didn’t say— The wild bit of irony buried in New Hampshire history: MacDonald himself spent eighteen months on the outside of an empty chief justice seat before he ever sat in it— A hard look at whether December’s hearing on Justice Hantz Marconi can mean anything at all when its most consequential witness — Gordon MacDonald — appears once, in one sentence, and is currently unreachable— Real precedent for why a retired judge can still face real discipline— The Dianne Martin question I still can’t let go of: how does an outgoing director get to negotiate the terms of her own exit and her own rehire?

I don’t have all the answers here, and I’m not going to pretend I do. What I have is a hearing date, a growing list of unanswered questions, and a habit of writing both down where you can see them.

December 7th through 9th, One Granite Place, Concord. Still on the calendar. I’ll be there.

Whether Gordon MacDonald will be — that’s the question the whole state should be asking.

Receipts over vibes. Always.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a two-day gap I can’t stop thinking about.

On July 29th, the Judicial Conduct Committee quietly filed formal misconduct charges against retired NH Supreme Court Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi. On July 31st, sitting Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald announced — with zero explanation, effective immediately — that he was taking medical leave.

Maybe that’s nothing. Institutions have unglamorous, boring reasons for their timing all the time. But I’ve spent the last few weeks in court filings, sworn testimony, and public records, and “nothing” is not the word I’d reach for anymore.

Here’s what I found sitting quietly in a legal filing nobody outside a courthouse has read closely: on October 23, 2024, under oath, Hantz Marconi stated she told MacDonald she planned to meet with then-Governor Sununu about her husband’s criminal investigation — and that MacDonald raised no objection. Two months earlier, MacDonald told AG investigators, with his own attorney present, that the meeting was “news to me.”

Both statements are sworn. Both are on the record. Both cannot be true.

Nobody has ever been asked to reconcile them.

That’s the loose thread that pulled this whole episode into being — and once I started pulling, the knot kept getting bigger. A retired justice’s own admissions about a ten-minute meeting with a sitting governor. A $50,000 payout an HR professional of thirty years called, under oath, “basically almost” fraud — right before she was fired for reporting it. A hearing, finally, scheduled for December. And a money trail running from a 2017 ballot campaign straight up to a mysterious communications contract signed the same week the walls started closing in.

This is not a story about certainty. I don’t know, definitively, who’s telling the truth in that contradiction — and I’m not going to pretend I do just to give you a satisfying ending. What I do know is that in a state small enough for everyone to sit on the same commissions and answer to the same handful of names, the people meant to police each other rarely do.

So I did it instead. Receipts over vibes. Every time.

In this episode:— The full, documented timeline behind Justice Hantz Marconi’s formal charges— The sworn contradiction between MacDonald and Hantz Marconi that no one has investigated— Sworn HR testimony on the Dianne Martin payout, quoted directly— The money trail — Marsy’s Law, and a fresh contract worth asking hard questions about— What’s actually on the calendar this December, and why it matters to every person in this state, not just the ones with law degrees

The JCC hearing on Justice Hantz Marconi is set for December 7–9, at One Granite Place in Concord — open to the public. Mark it down. I’ll see you there.

As always: everything here is sourced to court filings, sworn testimony, and public records, cited as we go. Where something’s still unconfirmed, I tell you so directly — that’s not a hedge, that’s the whole point of doing this job honestly.

Listen to the full episode below. And if you’ve got documents, tips, or a thread you think I should be pulling — you know where to find me.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

Is Gordon MacDonald really sick?

Is Gordon MacDonald really on medical leave — or is the New Hampshire Supreme Court managing a crisis of its own making?

In this episode, we trace a pattern that stretches back to 2002, when an Attorney General named Phil McLaughlin refused to believe a state line could stop a scandal from crossing it. Twenty-four years later, we’re asking the same question about a different institution: New Hampshire’s only forensic lab, and the criminalist the State kept putting on the witness stand for decades — despite a disciplinary file that says exactly why it shouldn’t have.

This episode connects the MacDonald leave of absence, the ethics complaint against Jane Young, the structural conflict inside the State Police forensic lab, the 2019 rape kit backlog, and the 2024 Personnel Appeals Board ruling on Kevin McMahon — all under one throughline: institutions don’t self-report. They wait to get caught.

Receipts over vibes. Every claim in this episode is backed by public record, on-the-record sourcing, or documented correspondence.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a version of this story that fits in a headline: state officials asked to alter evidence in an active investigation. That version is true, as far as it goes. But it’s not the interesting part, and it’s definitely not the part that should worry you.

The interesting part is the order things happened in.

On July 3rd, 2017, Jane Young — then Associate Attorney General and Chief of the Criminal Justice Bureau — emailed a coalition public affairs director about a St. Paul’s School yearbook. She’d spoken with the state forensic lab. They believed they could remove a sticker from a page. Could they try?

The next morning, an answer: happy to drop the yearbook off wherever’s convenient.

Four days later, Jane Young is quoted publicly confirming a criminal investigation into St. Paul’s School has begun — and the yearbook is part of the story.

Nobody, at the time, mentioned that the state’s own lab had already altered it.

That gap — between what happened privately on July 3rd and 4th, and what the public was told on July 8th — is the entire story. Not because altering a sticker is inherently sinister. Sometimes evidence needs handling. But because who asked for it, how it was authorized, and what wasn’t said afterward are the kinds of details a defense attorney, a jury, or frankly the public are supposed to get to weigh for themselves. They didn’t get the chance. Not in 2017, and not for years after — because these emails stayed out of public view until a Right-to-Know request pried them loose.

That timing gap is now doing real legal work. A formal grievance filed with the Attorney General’s office argues the statute of limitations shouldn’t be read as having started back in 2017, precisely because none of this was discoverable until recently. The same grievance raises a Brady question — whether information that should have reached St. Paul’s School as the subject of a criminal probe, didn’t. Whether either argument holds is not something we’re going to pretend to adjudicate from a podcast studio. That’s the Attorney General’s job now, formally, on the record.

What we can tell you is what’s provable: the email chain exists. The statute — RSA 641:6, Falsifying Physical Evidence — exists, and it’s a Class B felony. The grievance exists. And the tangle of conflicts around who is supposed to review any of it — a complaint against Jane Young that her own state’s attorney disciplinary body says it can’t hear because Young sits on the committee that would hear it — also exists, and it’s almost farcical in how neatly it closes the loop.

Small state. Smaller room. Same names, different hats — over and over, for years.

We laid out the full paper trail, statute language, and grievance details in this week’s episode. Watch/listen below, and if you’ve got documents relevant to this thread or others in our New Hampshire accountability series, you know where to find us. We protect sources, always.

Receipts over vibes. Every time.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a pattern in New Hampshire, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it: the people closest to the truth are the ones most afraid to speak it.

This episode follows the crisis at the Sununu Youth Services Center — the resignations, the involvement of the Attorney General’s office, and a juvenile justice veteran with two decades on the job who still, even now, won’t put their name to what they saw. We ask why. And we ask what it costs a state when institutional self-protection works exactly as designed: silence the insiders, discredit the outsiders, wait for the story to die of exhaustion instead of disproof.

NH Supreme Court rejects lawsuit challenging child protection system

The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a former state employee who accused the Department of Health and Human Services of failing to protect children from abuse and neglect.

www.wmur.com

Jul 21, 2021

https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-supreme-court-rejects-child-protection-system-lawsuit/37089571

https://www.nhpr.org/health/2020-02-13/dhhs-employee-files-whistleblower-lawsuit-over-child-protection-services

https://www.concordmonitor.com/2019/09/30/st-pauls-school-concord-nh-grand-jury-report-remain-confidential-28809670/

https://indepthnh.org/2020/02/02/spaulding-bewildered-by-ags-request-to-probe-hilliard-for-laurie-list/

Built on public record, on-the-record sourcing, and a standard I don’t budge on: receipts over vibes.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe

New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know law promises that government records belong to the public. This episode is what happens when you actually try to collect.

Over two weeks, our research team filed records requests with the State of New Hampshire and the City of Concord — about the state forensic laboratory, a criminalist named Kevin McMahon, an internal affairs policy, and a grant check the city signed with its own hand. What came back wasn’t transparency. It was technique.

In this episode, I break down four moves — by name, with the actual letters on screen — so you’ll recognize them the next time your government throws one at you:

* The Hot Potato — your concern gets quietly forwarded to the very agency it’s about

* The Empty Drawer — the wrong office truthfully says it has nothing, and doesn’t tell you where the right one is

* The Slow Clock — nobody says no, the answer just arrives after it stops mattering (mark your calendar: September 25, 2026)

* The Preemptive Maybe — the exemption gets floated before anyone’s even searched

And underneath all four moves sits a real question with a paper trail: sworn 2014 testimony about DNA contamination and a 2011 suspension, a 2024 disciplinary ruling that never mentions either — and a decade of trials in between where a jury may never have heard the difference.

Every request is filed. Every deadline is written down. This show will be here when they come due.

Receipts over vibes — always.

🎙️ New episode of The Gracie Gato Podcast is live.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe