The Carousel of Candor

By Jeffrey Thomas Clay

NEWMARKET, NH — When public officials choose to operate outside the boundaries of the New Hampshire Right-to-Know law (RSA 91-A), they face a choice: admit the misstep, or build a wall of deception to hide it. In the Town of Newmarket, the choice was the latter.

What began as a lawless, unrecorded rolling email vote by the Newmarket Town Council to clear a controversial settlement contract has metastasized into a multi-year, multi-attorney shell game designed to deceive the Right-to-Know Ombudsman, the Rockingham County Superior Court, and ultimately, the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

At the center of this scandal is a stark, fatal contradiction. Under the pressure of live judicial scrutiny, the town’s legal defense has fractured, exposing a calculated pattern of material misrepresentations that crosses the line from aggressive advocacy into an outright Fraud Upon the Court and a clear violation of RSA 641:7 (Tampering with Public Records or Information).

The Origin of the Falsehood: Stephen Fournier’s Secret Shield
The paper trail of deception began on August 28, 2023, when Newmarket Town Manager Stephen Fournier received a formal public records request seeking the minutes, discussions, and votes of the Town Council regarding a $2,000 taxpayer-funded settlement agreement. Fournier instantly slammed the door on transparency, certifying in writing: "As these were consultations with legal counsel, no such documents exist."

To insulate this cover-up from administrative review, Fournier doubled down under oath. In a sworn affidavit dated September 26, 2023, filed directly with the Right-to-Know Ombudsman, Fournier swore that the settlement "was not performed at a Town Council meeting," but was instead the product of a "legal consultation email" and the "manner of the Council's response to that legal counsel's related communication..."

Fournier’s strategy was simple: cloak official public business under the guise of an exempt "legal consultation" to justify why no public notices, minutes, or records existed. But a contract cannot legally exist without a lawful vote of the public body. By claiming no vote occurred, Fournier exposed the contract as unauthorized; by hiding the communication, he hid the lawlessness.

Enter DTC Attorney #1: John J. Ratigan and the Privilege Shield
To legitimize Fournier’s fabrication, the Town deployed Donahue, Tucker & Ciandella, PLLC (DTC). On October 5, 2023, DTC Attorney John J. Ratigan filed a formal Answer with the Ombudsman. Ratigan explicitly locked the firm into Fournier’s narrative, telling the tribunal that the settlement was merely "the product of the Town Council email responses to the Town legal counsel's email inquiry."

Ratigan legally categorized this rolling email clearinghouse as a protected "non-meeting," certifying to the Ombudsman that because it was cloaked in "the attorney-client privilege," there were “no Town Council meeting minutes that illustrate discussions, deliberations and votes taken by the Town Council...” Ratigan used the firm’s corporate weight to ensure the Ombudsman dismissed the matter without ever seeing the rolling electronic paper trail.

DTC Attorneys #2 & #3: Warren and Matuszko Re-Write the "Facts"
When the battle shifted to the Rockingham County Superior Court, the narrative underwent a sinister mutation. Realizing that an asynchronous electronic vote to spend public funds violates the very core of RSA 91-A, DTC shifted from calling the email chain a "privileged meeting" to claiming it never happened at all.

On January 17, 2024, DTC Attorneys Briana L. Matuszko and William K. Warren filed a certified Statement of Material Facts to Judge Schulman. In Responses 2 and 3, Matuszko and Warren certified to the court as an absolute fact that "there were no deliberations or votes taken by the Town Council." They doubled down in Responses 8 and 9, flatly stating: "the Town Council did not deliberate or vote through email exchanges regarding the Agreement with legal counsel."

This was a definitive, certified representation to a Superior Court Judge. Matuszko and Warren certified that the legislative body of Newmarket took no collective action via email.

The Trial Collapse and the Post-Hearing Lie
The entire multi-attorney house of cards collapsed during the March 2024 consolidated hearing. Confronted with the reality of an enforceable contract, Attorney John Ratigan was forced to break character. Faced with judicial scrutiny, Ratigan admitted that the Town Council did conduct a rolling, asynchronous email chain to authorize and approve the execution of the settlement agreement.

The trap was sprung. If Ratigan’s trial admission was true, then the prior six months of certified court pleadings signed by Matuszko and Warren—stating under penalty of law that no such votes or email deliberations occurred—were patently false.

Astonishingly, rather than correcting the record, DTC chose to double down on the deception. On April 8, 2024, eleven days after the hearing, Matuszko and Warren submitted their formal Post-Hearing Brief. Defying the evidence, they again wrote: "the Town reiterates that there was no meeting held between members of the Town Council, or members of Town Council and Town legal counsel, related to the Agreement."

DTC Attorney #4: Scaling the Fraud to the Supreme Court
The climax of this institutional deception occurred on March 3, 2025. Rather than advising their municipal client to clear the air, the DTC appellate team, led by Briana L. Matuszko, filed their formal Response Brief with the New Hampshire Supreme Court (Docket No. 2024-0474).

Before the highest justices in the state, the firm finalized its fabricated factual record. On page 11 of their Supreme Court brief, Matuszko flatly certified: "...there were no emails between the Town Manager and the Town Council related to the Agreement..." On page 13, she repeated: "The Town Council never held a meeting, nor did they meet with Town legal counsel, to discuss or approve the Agreement."

The Anatomy of Fraud Upon the Court
This is not a case of alternative legal interpretations; it is the systematic engineering of a false factual record. Under New Hampshire Rule of Professional Conduct 3.3 (Candor Toward the Tribunal), attorneys have an absolute, non-delegable duty of honesty to the court.

DTC and Stephen Fournier engaged in a coordinated carousel of counsel:

They told the Ombudsman the emails existed but were privileged legal consultations.

They told the Superior Court the emails did not involve votes or deliberations.

They admitted at trial that the emails were the exact tool used to approve the contract.

They told the Supreme Court that no such emails between the Town Manager and Council even existed.

By feeding different versions of reality to different judges, Stephen Fournier, John Ratigan, William Warren, and Briana Matuszko did not just violate the trust of the electorate—they polluted the integrity of the New Hampshire judicial branch. When corporate attorneys repeatedly certify manufactured facts to judges to win an enforcement order, it ceases to be defense lawyering. It becomes Fraud Upon the Court.