UPDATE: JOE BINDBEUTEL CAUGHT LYING AGAIN

New information from Joe Bindbeutel's interview with Senate investigators has Bindbeutel playing his same old game - giving out false information to protect the Nixon Administration.

DNR officials involved in E.Coli-Gate are being caught in a difficult position – many of them have made false statements about their roles in the past, and are now being forced to account for them.

One former DNR official, Joe Bindbeutel, is digging a very deep hole for himself. Deep enough to share with the Nixon Administration.

His account is full of prevarication and a consistent inability to recall specific details, but several things still stand out.

Bindbeutel tried to avoid telling investigators when he first had the test results in his hands. He says he first heard of the results on May 29th, and said “I did not look at the numbers, I didn’t have that in front of me.” Later he claims “It wasn’t until . . . much later that I got into the EPA samples, the numbers and those standards.”

Is this true? Not according to Susanne Medley, whose painfully honest interview with Senate investigators has exposed Bindbeutel in a lie before.

Medley said, “That morning [29th] I met with Joe Bindbeutel . . . I talked to him about the lake study. And I handed him the numbers and he’s like, what the heck does this mean?”

Bindbeutel is lying about when he got the results, and under what conditions. Can someone put this guy under a subpoena? Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, his lie just keep getting bigger.

Bindbeutel tried to defend the decision to conceal the results by saying that “E. Coli is a bug native to the guts of warm-blooded animals. And when you take E. coli out of that environment, they begin to die”  - therefore, the test results were not “relevant to the existing conditions at the Lake of the Ozarks.”

Bindbeutel is pretending that there wasn't a serious concern about the test results.

In the same interview he makes two confessions that contradict this account. First he says, “there was a substantial amount of uncertainty about the causes and there was a substantial uncertainty about what the department should or needed to do.”

Second, when the test results in some areas came back higher than has ever been recorded at the Lake of the Ozarks, Bindbeutel said it crossed his mind that there was a serious problem that could require direct intervention. He goes on to say he wanted to do a second round of tests but never got around to it. Really?

Medley’s account is much clearer. She described a May 29 meeting with Templeton and Bindbeutel in the following terms: “If they continued to be high over time, you know, well, maybe we should be proactive and actually try to do something before the end of the five years because maybe there’s a sewer system or something that’s causing it that we’re not aware of.”

Bindbeutel didn’t make a decision to withhold the test results because he thought they weren’t important to public safety. Bindbeutel’s claim that there was no health hazard, and by extension the same claim from Mark Templeton, is a flat out lie. They had no way to be sure and didn’t try to follow up on it. Why?

All signs point to the Nixon administration.

We know that Bindbeutel had a meeting at the Governor’s office on June 4th and stayed several hours beyond his scheduled time (which he neglected to tell anyone about before, and now claims he doesn't remember exactly who he met with).

He claims E. Coli never came up, even in the conversations he "doesn't remember," despite the fact he requested more information for another meeting later that week. He says that meeting, to be held with Nixon’s Chief of Staff and  DNR Liaison John Watson, was canceled. This can't be independently confirmed because Sunshine requests for security footage outside the Governor's office (which would show who was coming in for meetings) was denied on terrorism grounds.

All we know for sure is that Bindbeutel’s bumbling progress screeched to a halt immediately after visiting the Governor’s office.

The sudden change raised eyebrows in the DNR. Susanne Medley, attempting to explain Bindbeutel’s sudden disinterest in the test results, speculated that he “had already checked out knowing he was going to be moving on. So that was another challenge of getting focused throughout the month.”

Her account of a typical conversation with Bindbeutel: “Joe, where are you? Joe, have you gotten this? Joe, Joe, Joe.”

The effort to tell the Nixon Administration had mysteriously evaporated. Despite multiple conversations with John Watson over the next few weeks, Bindbeutel claims he never brought the test results up. When he finally says he did, on June 23rd, he says it was only an afterthought.

Bindbeutel has lied so many times, it's impossible to believe that he never spoke to John Watson or Nixon. When he told the Lake of the Ozarks Watershed Alliance that Nixon was personally aware of the situation, was that really just “bureaucratic speak”? The answer has to be a resounding no.

It sounds a lot like Bindbeutel is dragging the Nixon Administration down with him.