(Bismarck, ND) — North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley tells the McKenzie County Farmer and KTGO Radio (AM 1090 / FM 92.7) that more than 2,000 state emails and text messages of his predecessor, Wayne Stenehjem, that were once thought deleted have been recovered. The messages could be pivotal in the trial of former state Senator Ray Holmberg.
The trial is set to begin in April and Wrigley’s office has been leading the prosecution.
Holmberg, who served for decades as a Republican from Grand Forks, has been charged with felony counts of possessing child pornography and traveling overseas for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex with a minor. He has pleaded not guilty.
Stenehjem was serving as the state’s Attorney General when he died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest on January 28, 2022. He has not been accused of any crimes involving Holmberg.
In an interview with Scott Hennen on the “What’s On Your Mind” program, Wrigley said it was a stunning development that the messages resurfaced.
“What we’re talking about is Wayne’s personal phone. He had the state Outlook account installed on there. This is very common in state government as the days of people carrying two phones are behind us. When Wayne passed away suddenly, everything was sort of in disarray and a day or so afterwards, a family member brought the phone to the BCI (Bureau of Criminal Investigation) and said they wanted to get into the phone for purposes of extracting photographs for the memorial and the funeral. So, the BCI plugged it into the equipment that we have in law enforcement, but they weren’t able to get into the phone.”
Wrigley had not yet been selected or sworn in as Attorney General at that time.
“Those companies update the software and then eventually you can typically get into it, but it sometimes it can take a long time and that’s what happened in this instance; it took a year. They did finally get into it in February of 2023 but then the phone would continue to loop and they couldn’t get into it and they put it back on the shelf. Then in May there was a new upgrade to the equipment and they put it on there again, and they punched in the numbers from February and they were able to get into the phone.”
Since Stenehjem and Holmberg were friends, investigators believed that communications between the two could shed light on the case. Political observers say the fact that Liz Brocker, Stenehjem’s executive assistant, directed the state email account to be deleted the day after he died raises serious questions about what might have been deleted. Brocker later resigned, as did Stenehjem’s chief Deputy Troy Siebel.
“I want to confirm what we know to be true,” said Wrigley. “All the experts, Microsoft and everyone, knew the email account was gone. It remains gone. It was gone from the time that Liz Brocker directed that account be deleted. So now we have this phone and it’s the functional equivalent of them putting Wayne’s phone on a zip drive and then into a sock drawer because that phone was no longer communicating back and forth with the system…So that phone has been long gone. And nobody around there knew that’s where the emails were. Liz did, but the BCI told me the other day that they didn’t know if Wayne had one phone or 5 phones. No one even thought of that.”
But Wrigley says about 3 weeks ago, investigators discussed some new information that might have potentially touched Stenehjem’s phone and could be introduced during Holmberg’s trial. Further conversation led investigators to conclude that information from the phone would have likely been backed up by the state’s IT system.
“So they walked over to the computer, and it took a little while, but there it was and they found it there. That’s Wayne’s phone, we have a complete account.”
Wrigley said a search warrant was promptly obtained in federal court.
“A search warrant means that they had established, and proven to the judge, that it was more likely than not that a crime had been committed and it was more likely than not that evidence of that crime was on the phone.”
Wrigley says he credits Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Poole for her determination in leading the investigation. It was Poole who broke the news to Wrigley that the search had been successful.
“She is an outstanding professional. She is smart and she is dogged and determined to get to the bottom of things. She called me and said, ‘Drew, are you sitting down?’ The emails are on the phone. It is startling…This is an intriguing and interesting investigation and I think it’s going to bear fruit going forward.”
Wrigley says the recovered file is a “complete mirror image” of Stenehjem’s phone at the time of his death, and according to Wrigley, a “very significant volume of text messages that may assist us in the Ray Holmberg prosecution.” When asked how many text messages were on the phone, Wrigley said “many thousands.”
Wrigley added that because the search warrant was legally obtained, investigators can also use any public or private communications for other legal proceedings, including a continuing investigation into a financing deal involving a state lawmaker who owned a building that Stenehjem leased for government office space. That investigation led to the discovery that the email account had been deleted.
A special prosecutor recently ruled that charges could not be brought against Brocker, because at that time North Dakota law didn’t clearly define that emails are a government record. A new state law has since gone into effect that changes this.
Wrigley says the search warrant gave specific reasons for looking into the cell phone data and currently, that rationale is classified but at some point, either during or after the Holmberg trial, that information will be released to the public.
And if it can be proven through this recently discovered phone data that anyone around Stenehjem obstructed justice?
“When people mislead, and when we can prove that they have not been forthright and honest with law enforcement and that they’ve done that in a way of trying to obstruct the investigative process, those cases get pursued as well.”
