This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
Jonathan Ellis is a veteran South Dakota reporter and co-founder of the independent journal The Dakota Scout. He brings the top stories he's been pursuing in the past few weeks to In the Moment.
The South Dakota Supreme Court recently ruled that the affidavits related to the T. Denny Sanford investigation must be released. Ellis has followed the investigation from its beginning. He offers an analysis and predictions on what could come next in the legal battle.
Ellis also brings an analysis on South Dakota's underwhelming GDP. The latest report tracks another economic decrease, but that isn't a significant cause for concern. Learn why.
Plus, Ellis turned a family member's trip to the urgent care clinic into a story. Hear what providers and meteorologists say about the higher rate of slips and falls last winter.
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Lori Walsh:
You are listening to In The Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Jonathan Ellis has stepped into the studio now on this lovely rather warm day already. It seems like it turned over pretty quickly out there.
Jonathan Ellis:
I dare say we really earned it.
Lori Walsh:
Yes, that's true.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yes.
Lori Walsh:
That's true, we have earned this. This is our Wednesday conversation with the Dakota Political Junkies. Jonathan is a member of our rotating panel of journalists and political scientists across the state. He runs the Dakota Scouts, or is co-founder of the Dakota Scout online and in print, you can usually find it around town, or you can also subscribe online.
Looking at some stuff that's kind of important to you. South Dakota Supreme Court issued after only three weeks a decision on a case that you've been not just following, but have been part of for a long time. Tell us a little bit about our implicated individual and what we know. I want to go back to the beginning with this.
Jonathan Ellis:
Sure.
Lori Walsh:
When did this first become something that when you were working at the Argus Leader you and Corey Myers, the editor at the time, said we need to do something about transparency in this case.
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, this all started in December of 2019, and we started preparing for... Learning that there had been an investigation into the implicated individual, which I think everybody knows now is Mr. T. Denny Sanford. And there had been some inappropriate materials that had been found or had been sent to accounts that he controlled, or devices that he controlled. And so to be blunt it was a child pornography investigation. The first warrant was issued in December of 2019, we were aware of it shortly in that time span, and additional warrants were issued in March, and so we kind of prepared for that. We didn't have on the record sources to write a story at the time, and that didn't come until later that summer.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, a lot of rumors going around. So help people understand why it's important to see at this point, because the investigation was closed without prosecution, he's not been prosecuted for this. What information do you want to see and why do you think the public needs to see it?
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, the remainder of the affidavits for these search warrants are sort of the evidence that an investigator would have presented to the judge in order to get sign off to show that there's probable cause to get a search warrant here. And so we would get an idea of what happened here.
And because the case was closed without prosecution, that's true enough, and there probably, there's maybe some good reasons for that. Mr. Sanford's legal team had argued that his accounts had been hacked and that in fact the investigators knew the identity of the hacker. So piecing together what has been said previously in this case, and then being able to look at what the affidavits would probably provide the public a lot more insight into what triggered the investigation to start with, and then putting those pieces together, what we've learned, how this all unfolded. Obviously he's a person in this state, this region of the country. I mean the country, he's one of the richest men in the country, that there's a public interest in that.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. What happens next now that the Supreme Court, the South Dakota State Supreme Court, has upheld the opening of those, releasing of those affidavits. They're going to redact some of it because of personal phone numbers, but they did not give the legal team the opportunity to do their own redaction. When does that happen? What are we waiting for?
Jonathan Ellis:
His legal team has an opportunity to request a rehearing. I mean, that's kind of a Hail Mary pass, but you always have that opportunity to do that, and there's a time limit for that to happen, and that clock is ticking. We've already... Legal team for the Argus Leader and ProPublica who joined in this, have already asked them to just waive that because really there's... I mean, the decision came in three weeks. It's the second decision in this case too, this is the second time they'd been to the Supreme Court. And so I mean, three weeks decision comes you kind of got dumped on, okay?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Jonathan Ellis:
So you might as well just move on.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about some other reporting that you've been working on, which is the decrease in South Dakota's GDP for the fourth quarter of 2022, worst performance of any state in the country. That sounds pretty bad. State officials say not so fast. That's not the only thing that we're looking at. Talk broadly about what you learned about the economic health of South Dakota as it relates to the drought and the AG industry. There is a little pain point going on.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah, clearly. So these are the fourth quarter estimates that came out recently by the Bureau of Economy and Administration. And so they base these estimates on a host of factors. And yeah, South Dakota had the worst, we had negative GDP growth in those estimates, and I think only three states had that. And interestingly they were South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa. My memory, my own reporting is serving correct here. And that's in large part both from the federal government and from the state saying look, I mean, there were some issues with wages of proprietary owned farmsteads, and part of that is the drought, the estimates that went into yield for corn, beans, things like that. Those were down just because of the drought.
Now interestingly enough, I mean we've had a spring where that drought's been knocked out. And so that's an argument that this is a temporary, or that this is going to be revised as we get closer to when final numbers are released later in the year, and that's what Jim Turilliger argued in that story, he's our commissioner of finance and management, that these things get revised all the time, and his expectation is that that will be revised.
But nonetheless, I mean his point is that's just one metric, there are lots of other metrics to look at, and there are multi years of metrics to look at. Looking at one quarter of one metric doesn't give you a complete picture so he says. Now that's also though, I mean, we are not used to in the last few years in South Dakota to seeing a number, a metric like that. Our metrics have across the board have been pretty strong throughout. So this is a little bit of a different metric than we've seen in a while.
Lori Walsh:
And it makes people nervous because we keep talking about the economy sort of tightening a little bit. Are we on the way to recession? Interest rates. And you can throw out your bumper sticker slogans about whose fault it is, but people are a little apprehensive. And now we also passed, we being state legislator, passed a tax cut. How does that all sort of play into the political conversation about taxes when people start getting apprehensive about the future?
Jonathan Ellis:
Well first I should confess it is my fault.
Lori Walsh:
Is it? Okay.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah. But no, with the tax... I mean, so you had-
Lori Walsh:
I'm here to hold you accountable.
Jonathan Ellis:
Right. The debate over... You had people in the Senate particularly who were concerned about cutting taxes because of this uncertainty. It always feels like we're living in times of uncertainty, but you had the different tax proposals and the Senate, kind of some of them reluctantly went ahead with cutting a tax here, but they put the sunset on it, because their argument, and these are Republican senators saying we have to be fiscally conservative because at the end of the day the government's got to be able to pay its bills.
Lori Walsh:
Right. We don't want to be the people who voted for the tax cut that ended up upending the strength of South Dakota's economy essentially, which is really pretty consistent usually.
Jonathan Ellis:
It's been very consistent through decades really.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Interesting. All right, one of my favorite things that you've written on the Dakota Scout recently was how many people slipped on the ice and fell over this winter, which is not funny at all, except how many times. I mean, I broke my ankle a couple years ago so I've done the ice thing. I've done the Ice Capades, you found out that I'm not alone, that people who tried to get outside in this, motor through winter, paid a price.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah, and this is in the story, but I only got alerted to this really because my wife walked outside on our deck one night and fell and hit her head on our patio heater. And when she went in to urgent care to get that, which is still bandaged, the provider just anecdotally said, "Yeah, we've seen a ton of.", so I kind of reached out to the providers to say hey, I mean-
Lori Walsh:
So wait, pause there. You turned your wife's concussion into a story lead?
Jonathan Ellis:
It did get turned into a story, correct.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Just so you know, what it's like to live with journalist.
Jonathan Ellis:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
But they said yeah, this is happening a lot.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah. This was just anecdotally she learned, this is at an urgent care, and that all winter they were seeing all of these people who were falling on ice. And so I kind of reached out to both healthcare providers and then I found an anecdote of somebody who'd fallen, I can't obviously use my wife, and the National Weather Service had some theories about why. I mean, this was a long, hard winter. If you're new to South... One of the many new people in South Dakota, they're not all like this.
Lori Walsh:
Welcome.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Welcome. They're not usually this bad, although who knows, maybe the dire derecho season is upon us all of a sudden. Who knew that was a thing?
Jonathan Ellis:
Bring it.
Lori Walsh:
Which brings us back to a little history that you were working on, which I had not forgotten about, but I didn't realize it was the 10 year anniversary of the Great Ice Storm.
Jonathan Ellis:
The Great Ice Apocalypse as it was called. And I could tell it... Well anyway, I filed that story just before we're coming here, and we'll have that in our print edition, that goes to press this afternoon, and obviously it will print online, but that was really a remarkable storm for this region. And if you talk to the National Weather Service, Phil Schumacher explained to me that was a multi-day storm where you just get round after round after round of bad weather, that threw tens of thousands of people without power for week, even more if you were outside of the city.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I think that's the year that my daughter and I stayed home and made butter sculptures.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah, I mean-
Lori Walsh:
They're still in the freezer. Yeah, they were like what are we going to... Well, we're going to make dogs out of sticks of butter.
Jonathan Ellis:
You still have them?
Lori Walsh:
Yes.
Jonathan Ellis:
That's cool.
Lori Walsh:
They are frozen in my freezer and they sit and look at me every time I open the freezer.
Jonathan Ellis:
That's a great memory. I mean, three days of school, they canceled three days of school.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, no school. She would have been what, 13 or something, 12, in that area. And parents, yeah, we were upended, then people didn't have heat.
Jonathan Ellis:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
Our climbing tree came down.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah. So you had to haul your branches out to the curb, and the city came, and this was the largest recovery effort in city history.
Lori Walsh:
True apocalypse, ice apocalypse. All right, well bring it Ellis says.
Jonathan Ellis:
Bring it. Bring the weather.
Lori Walsh:
So that's your fault too, because you said it, if it comes tomorrow it's-
Jonathan Ellis:
I'll be back in July to take responsibility.
Lori Walsh:
Jonathan Ellis with the Dakota Scout. You can find their work online and around town in the print edition, town of Sioux Falls. Do you go out to the metro area?
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah, we also deliver in Pierre, Aberdeen, Watertown. We have some special spots there.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Hey, thanks for stopping by.
Jonathan Ellis:
Thanks for having me.
