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We fought Augusta County over a closed-door meeting: Why we’re now backing down

Chris Graham
FOIA
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We here at AFP found ourselves in a tight spot relative to Augusta County politics over the past year, and you may have noticed, it’s been kinda quiet on the Augusta County 6 front on our pages the past couple of months.

That’s not by accident.

The tight spot that we were in had us firmly in the middle of a bigger political battle between the AC6 and its rival, a group that has coalesced around the immigrant-bonding business, Nexus Services, which has been picking fights with county leaders for nearly a decade.

How we got in the middle of that fight was, we took the county to court to get access to a recording of an Augusta County Board of Supervisors closed-door meeting in 2023 in which the resignation of former South River Supervisor Steven Morelli was the hot topic.

The reason we decided to drop the issue: I can’t figure out here who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

The two sides

Augusta County
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On the one side, we have the AC6, the name I’ve given to the six-member Republican supermajority of the Board of Supervisors that governs without any checks or balances, put in place and perpetuated by a one-party system in which a relative few people attending Republican Party mass meetings every two years determine BOS representation.

Our legal battle had us taking up the cause of the other side, represented by the one member of the Board of Supervisors who seems willing to put his neck on the political and personal chopping block to stand up to the AC6, Scott Seaton.

Seaton, who, like the Augusta County 6, is a Republican, was the one who had recorded the March 2023 closed-door session of the BOS in which the Morelli resignation was discussed.

Seaton contends that the meeting should have been held in open session, and it was his contention that we at AFP used as the basis of our decision to take the county to court, alleging that the county had violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act by holding that meeting behind closed doors.

Where things got uncomfortable for me in that fight was the emergence of an odd bedfellow in the form of Breaking Through News, a news website with ties to the principals at Nexus Services, a company that had set up its immigrant-bonding shop in Augusta County in 2015, and not soon after started picking fights with the county political establishment.

The Breaking Through News folks decided to take on the county on the Seaton recording matter as well, and that interjection, predictably, turned the court battle into a three-ring legal and political circus, with us here at AFP uncomfortably in the middle.

As this was all playing out, Nexus Services was hit with an $811 million fraud judgment in federal court, putting the future of the company in doubt, and around that same time, the Breaking Through News website went quiet, not posting fresh content for more than two months before getting back to a sporadic publishing schedule on July 10.

During that down time, a person associated with the Nexus Services company reached out to me to pitch a story on alleged misdeeds involving Ronald Smith, the ne’er-do-well twin brother of Augusta County Sheriff Donald Smith, a favorite legal target of the Nexus Services folks.

Between that, and the barrage of calls and emails that I got on a regular basis both from people tied closely to the Nexus Services group and one of their chief critics, the whole thing started to feel dirty, being in the middle of a urinating contest involving six Republicans who govern without accountability, and a seventh Republican who I want to think is on the up-and-up, but is only able to count as his allies the members of a group facing hundreds of millions in fines from a fraud judgment that has made it its mission to just cause trouble for county leaders for nearly a decade.

Where things need to go from here

republicans 2024
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A political housecleaning would seem to be what is needed to get things moving in the right direction, but that ain’t happening anytime soon in Augusta County, where the relative few who make their way to the polls every other odd-numbered year vote en masse for the candidates with the R beside their names.

Thus, the best course of action to get Augusta County back where it needs to be would seem to be working within the local Republican Party to get more people involved in vetting candidates and holding elected leaders accountable.

I’ll caution that I’m not sure I see anything like that happening in the here and now, with the MAGA wing of the party here, statewide and nationally more focused on purges of the insufficiently loyal than on running good candidates and keeping electeds’ feet to the fire.

I’m holding out hope that the presidential election goes the right way in November, that the Trumpist movement fades into the background, that sensible Republicans get their party back, and that they can clean things up from the inside.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting there.

In the meantime, acknowledging these realities, we’d like to keep fighting this fight for people in Augusta County, who deserve better than what they’re getting, but then, y’all are getting what y’all voted for.

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," a zero-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and a member of zero Halls of Fame, is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].