Unpublished Op-Ed #1 This draft op-ed was sent to the Dispatch , which acknowledged receipt but didn’t follow up in any way. This isn’t surprising in the sense that Coingate was never that big an issue in Columbus, but it’s somewhat puzzling in that the Dispatch was the only paper that really challenged what happened with audit documents at the time. Well, time changes owners and editors. Coingate and th Coingate and Ohio’s Memory Hole: Are Public Records Laws Meaningless? A dozen years ago, Ohio’s headlines were dominated by stories about “Coingate,” the supposedly failed coin fund investments made by the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (OBWC) with the politically-connected Toledo coin expert and dealer, Tom Noe. The news was fed by press releases from a group of Ohio agencies doing investigations: the Auditor of State, the Attorney General, the Inspector General, and the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office as well as the OBWC. The “Coingate” episode carried sp...