The administration of former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf spent tens of thousands of public dollars to hire private law firms — information that Wolf’s office and, for the past two years, lawyers for Gov. Josh Shapiro, have furiously fought to keep secret.

Angela Couloumbis of the nonpartisan newsroom Spotlight PA reported last week: “The information was turned over … late last month as part of a long-running court dispute over redactions the governor’s office had made to legal bills paid with taxpayer money.

“In response to a public records request, the office originally released documents that showed which firms it hired and how much those firms charged, but it blacked out the reasons the private law firms were hired.”

What is it about the term “taxpayer money” that some elected officials seem to struggle to understand?

It couldn’t be more straightforward: When taxpayer money is spent, taxpayers deserve to know how and why it was spent. It’s called public money for a reason.

And yet lawyers for Wolf and then Shapiro — both Democrats — sought to keep secret information about how nearly $368,000 was spent on private law firms, claiming the information was privileged.

Spotlight PA and LNP-LancasterOnline first requested the information in 2022, when Wolf was still governor. As Spotlight PA noted, “The news organizations asked for invoices and other financial documents for spending on outside law firms from 2019 through 2021.”

In response, Wolf’s Office of General Counsel provided copies of invoices submitted by six outside firms. “In every invoice,” Spotlight PA noted, “officials redacted the subject line, making it impossible to know why they were spending taxpayer money to hire the firms. They also blacked out other portions that provided details on the work conducted by the private lawyers.”

In seeking to explain why it failed to detail its legal bills, the Wolf administration claimed the information was sensitive and “disclosing it could jeopardize its legal strategy — therefore making it exempt” from the state’s public records law.

As we argued in 2022, the “sensitive” claim might be plausible when, for instance, national security is at stake, but not when disclosure might be merely embarrassing or inconvenient for government officials and their lawyers.

We also asked this at the time, and it’s a question to which we’d still love an answer: Why even have staff lawyers when so much legal work is contracted to the private sector?

Spotlight PA and LNP-LancasterOnline had to go to court to obtain unredacted copies of legal bills and other financial documents showing the reasons for hiring outside lawyers.

In July, a three-judge Commonwealth Court panel ordered the governor’s office to remove the redactions it had made to the subject lines of the documents related to spending on private law firms.

It turns out, as Spotlight PA reported last week, that the “unredacted records show top lawyers in the Wolf administration hired two firms to represent high-ranking administration officials, including two of the governor’s chiefs of staff, as well as unnamed witnesses in various state and federal investigations.”

“Another private law firm was hired to provide representation in an investigation launched by the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission into the actions of a high-ranking Wolf aide.”

One redaction seems to have been particularly unnecessary: The Wolf administration hired the private law firm Blank Rome in 2018 for — drum roll, please — tax advice.

That the Wolf administration redacted that mundane information illustrates just how quick it was to reflexively withhold information.

The Wolf administration began in 2015 with lofty promises of transparency. It proved to be a disappointment in that regard on multiple occasions.

What we don’t understand is why the Shapiro administration would continue the Wolf administration’s secrecy. Shapiro is a former state attorney general who notably and admirably blasted the Catholic Church for hiding the records of priests who sexually abused children. He’s likely to seek the presidency at some point. We’d think he’d want to champion government transparency at every opportunity.

But, like Wolf, Shapiro has had multiple failures on that front.

For example, members of Shapiro’s transition team were required to sign a nondisclosure agreement that barred them from publicly sharing information about their activities and warned they could be sued and fined if they breached the agreement. Shapiro’s office entered into a settlement agreement to resolve allegations of sexual harassment against a former senior aide; that agreement contained the kind of nondisclosure clause that often serves to shield alleged abusers.

His office also tried to keep under wraps some of the details of the furnishings purchased for the Governor’s Residence.

The unredacted records obtained by Spotlight PA didn’t contain any obvious bombshells — though plenty of questions about them remain to be answered. But that’s not the point.

The point is that if journalists hadn’t pressed for the unredacted documents — and if those journalists hadn’t been represented pro bono by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — Pennsylvanians would have only the barest scraps of information about how the governor’s office used taxpayer money to engage private lawyers.

These weren’t nuclear secrets that were being cloaked in secrecy. This was information the public was entitled to have.

Again (because it clearly needs to be repeated), if it’s taxpayer money, taxpayers have a right to know how it’s spent.

— LNP-LancasterOnline via TNS