County attorney requests special prosecutor in alleged Nebraska GOP break-in

LINCOLN, Neb. (Nebraska Examiner) — Lancaster County Attorney Pat Condon filed paperwork Friday requesting a special prosecutor to check the work of the Lincoln Police Department regarding last summer’s alleged break-in at the Nebraska Republican Party headquarters.

Condon, a Republican prosecutor backed by both the new and old leadership teams at the state GOP, asked a judge to appoint an outside prosecutor under a state statute that lets county attorneys to do so when the potential exists for conflicts of interest.

Condon declined Friday to discuss why he made the request beyond saying  he wanted to ensure “public confidence and integrity in all aspects of the criminal justice system.” 

 Earlier this week, Lincoln Police Sgt. Chris Vollmer confirmed that LPD had asked Condon to seek a special prosecutor. Insiders have said the department is confident the special prosecutor will come to the same conclusion they did.

 In August, Lincoln police determined that no crime was committed during the July 9-10 incident, hours after new populist leaders took over the state’s dominant political party from a group more closely tied to former Gov. Pete Ricketts, now a U.S. senator. 

But the new leaders of the party and their supporters have continued pushing for more information about what happened at state party headquarters just after the leadership change, when security cameras and physical and digital files temporarily disappeared from the offices. 

The party paid Tom Nesbitt, a private investigator and former colonel of the Nebraska State Patrol, more than $9,000 to look into the incident. He told the GOP he believes police made the wrong decision. His firm, Nesbitt Investigations, has been working with the state GOP to press Lincoln police to release the final police reports on the matter. 

GOP lawyer Paul Kratz sought a subpoena for the police reports but then asked to withdraw the request since a special prosecutor was being sought. Such records would not be released during an active law enforcement investigation. 

The state GOP filed a police report last summer alleging about $1,000 loss of property and data. Most of the missing cameras and items were returned. People tied to the former team said they kept items owned by campaigns, including the personal financial information of some campaign donors.

Nesbitt told a state GOP committee last month that the new GOP leadership has been unable to access footage from the party’s security cameras without the password and that he had to recover 200 gigabytes of emails deleted by someone tied to the old GOP regime.

One key question the special prosecutor will explore: whether anyone involved with the alleged incident was still employed by the state GOP or had legal access to the headquarters and property when accessed. If so, it gets much harder to allege that a crime occurred.

Police have not publicly named who was inside the headquarters at the time.

A Lancaster County District Court judge will select a prosecutor.  

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