Gregory McKain
INSLAW programmer whom Jack Rugh of the Justice Department telephoned in February 1985 with a job offer and the word that the trustees expected INSLAW to be liquidated within sixty days, the call Judge Bason treated as evidence of a plan to convert the bankruptcy.
Gregory McKain was a programmer at INSLAW who had worked on PROMIS from the start of the company's contract with the Executive Office for United States Attorneys. On February 21, 1985, shortly after INSLAW filed under Chapter 11, Jack Rugh, the deputy project manager who had, in the words of the special counsel's report, "been very impressed for some time with McKain's work and had discussed with McKain on several occasions the possibility of McKain working for DOJ," telephoned to ask whether he would be interested in joining the Department of Justice. According to McKain's testimony, Rugh told him during the call that the department had talked to the trustees, who said INSLAW would not survive Chapter 11 and would probably be in Chapter 7 within thirty to sixty days.1
McKain reported the conversation to Bill Hamilton, who was upset by it and had INSLAW's bankruptcy counsel, Stanley Salus of the firm of Charles Docter, take it up with the United States Trustee, William White, who assured them his office acted independently of the department. Rugh's account differed: he said he had offered only his personal opinion that INSLAW would end in liquidation. Bankruptcy Judge George Bason, in his 1988 findings, treated the call as part of the department's effort to force the company into liquidation and noted its business consequences, INSLAW's officers having had to spend time calming McKain and other employees who feared for their jobs and to incur legal fees investigating the claim. The special counsel Nicholas J. Bua wrote in 1993: "Arguably there is no more reason to think that Rugh is lying about this than there is to think that McKain is... It is equally possible, of course, that Mr. McKain simply misunderstood what Mr. Rugh had said. In the end, McKain's testimony provides some support to the conversion theory, but not enough to satisfy us that the theory is true." White later asked that a confidentiality order be worded to protect him from the kind of criticism INSLAW's counsel had made after the Rugh-McKain call.12
Sources
- U.S. Department of Justice. Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc., March 1993, pp. 211-214. https://archive.org/details/InslawPROMISBuaReport ↩
- In re INSLAW, Inc., 88 B.R. 484 (Bankr. D.D.C. 1988). The opinion was not examined; the statements that McKain had worked on PROMIS from the start and Bason's findings on the call's business consequences rest on a reporter summary of it. ↩
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