'Pretending to be stupid': Public college claims Warren campaign blasts aren't public records

A day after Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted herself responding to President Trump's State of the Union address last year, her reelection campaign adapted a phrase from the Massachusetts Democrat's video – "ugliness and distraction and crazy stories" – as the subject line of an email blast to her supporters, seeking to raise money via shared outrage at Trump's address.

The Defending Democracy Together Institute saved Warren's email blast through its Archive of Political Emails, letting any visitor see what she told people signed up to her campaign listserv, including a nursing professor at the Community College of Rhode Island.

According to the college, the contents of Warren's long-public fundraising pitch are not available to the professor – and likely hundreds of thousands more supporters – because it's exempt from The Ocean State's public records law and cannot be released unredacted.

It's the latest double-take response from a Rhode Island public institution in five years of transparency battles with lawyer and parental rights activist Nicole Solas, who was even sued by state and local teachers unions to stop the release of curricula and policies related to critical race theory, antiracism, gender theory and children's sexuality.

"I am so sick of public agency lawyers pretending to be stupid," Solas wrote on X on Monday, posting a portion of CCRI general counsel Ronald Cavallaro's response to her complaint and her own "AI rebuttal," which she shared in full with Just the News.

Cavallaro didn't respond when Just the News asked him to explain what expectation of privacy Warren for Senate has in an email blast seeking money, including when shown its inclusion in the Archive of Political Emails. Just the News found the original simply by searching for the email's subject line, which CCRI didn't redact.

Warren's office didn't answer when asked how it views the campaign's emails relative to public records law, CCRI's reading of the statute and whether the college asked its permission to release the campaign blast to Solas.

Solas filed an Access to Public Records Act request last month for a year of emails matching the word "transgender" to and from CCRI nursing professor Emily Cummiskey, her onetime nemesis from the South Kingstown School Committee and "a believer in transgender ideology," Solas told Just the News.

"I want to know if she's inserting her ideology into nursing classes because that has the potential to affect medical care for everyone," Solas wrote in a direct message. "CCRI already denied me curriculum materials so I'm resorting to investigating emails where instructors typically discuss class topics and policies."

The state's public colleges uniformly stopped producing her curricula requests under APRA after Solas started posting them, she said.

Cummiskey resigned as South Kingstown school board chair, then from the board in June 2021, citing backlash from the board's proposal to sue Solas to stop her APRA barrage. (The district never took down her School Committee page, however.)

Cummiskey had described the requests as "a disturbing attempt by a nationally organized, racist group" – now known as Defending Education – "to create chaos and intimidate our district" as it considered "equity and anti-racism curriculum." She later distanced herself from that statement, claiming it was written by a public relations firm, but did not apologize.

Solas's lawyers deposed her two years later in the former's legal fight to open up meetings of the district's BIPOC Advisory Committee, referring to black, indigenous and people of color. She sued Cummiskey and the district in 2024 for allegedly outsourcing their intimidation of Solas to the teachers unions that sued her in 2021.

Like a private 'training manual' or architectural plans

Solas and likeminded Rhode Island transparency advocates have accumulated a novel collection of actual or constructive APRA denials over the years.

Providence Public Schools refused to identify adult advisers to its LGBTQ student clubs on the basis that Solas had exposed the "medical information" of its director of equity and belonging –  Aarav Sundaresh's gender identity – despite Sundaresh having spoken publicly about identifying as a man and the district publicly identified Sundaresh as "trans." 

Barrington Public Schools demanded $116,000 to turn over social studies teacher Benjamin Fillo's curriculum. Solas wanted to know whether Fillo's lessons reflected his once-public viewpoint that the "piece of garbage" Charlie Kirk got what he deserved in assassination.

Back in February, the Foster-Glocester Regional School District told taxpayer Laurie Gaddis she'd have to cough up $1.2 million to see its contracts with her local schools, citing an estimated 80,000 hours of labor to review and redact 2.5 million emails.

The only record CCRI deemed responsive to Solas's request last month for "transgender" mentions in Cummiskey's emails, for calendar year 2025, was Warren for Senate's March 5, 2025, email blast. It said Trump "spent time targeting and politicizing a small group of transgender student athletes as a fear-mongering tactic" in his State of the Union address. 

CCRI blacked out everything but the header and the footer, showing Cummiskey's college email address was the recipient and that the message was paid for by Warren for Senate, which put a copyright notice on it.

"In this email, it is clearly stated that all of its content is under a claim of copyright as of 2025, by Warren for Senate," CCRI's Cavallaro told Special Assistant Attorney General Adam Roach in his Sept. 14 response to Solas's APRA complaint. 

Roach's office deems copyrighted information APRA-exempt, according to Cavallaro, citing a decade-old opinion involving a Department of Health "training manual" that included "[t]rade secrets and commercial or financial information" that is "privileged or confidential." 

Warren for Senate's email body "is also a trade secret of the copyright holder," Cavallaro said.

Referring to a 2025 advisory opinion involving federal copyright protections for architectural plans, Cavallaro said Roach's office went even further to shield Warren for Senate's email from APRA disclosure, under exemptions for both trade secrets and federal copyright.

If Warren for Senate's email blasts don't qualify for an APRA copyright exemption, "then the College’s ability to obtain information in the future would be hindered (and it would be forced to subject itself to possible liability by releasing such information in response to a public records request under the APRA)," Cavallaro said.

In a footnote he suggested the email blast might qualify for a third APRA exemption: "Correspondence of or to elected officials with or relating to those they represent and correspondence of or to elected officials in their official capacities."

College argument would create 'a hole the size of every ActBlue blast'

CCRI did not make a "good-faith legal defense," Solas told Roach on Monday, repeatedly portraying the college's lawyer as making arguments he cannot possibly believe. 

"It is a knowing attempt to convert a mass political fundraising email into a 'trade secret' so the College can hide the only responsive content" – the word "transgender" – "in the only document it admits exists," the March 5, 2025, email blast.

The exemption covers only "voluntarily submitted commercial or financial information of a kind the submitter would customarily not release to the public," but Warren for Senate emails "exist to be released to the public" and are affixed with the campaign's social media icons. 

The "proprietary Intoxilyzer training manual" cited by Cavallaro "is not a close analogy," she wrote: It's used "only in closed vendor training" and the company "refused the requester directly." By contrast, Warren for Senate "blasted a fundraising pitch from a public-facing domain."

If the federal copyright exemption applies, "every newsletter, news article, vendor PDF, and campaign mailer sitting on a state server would vanish from APRA" as long as it had a "copyright footer" like Warren for Senate's blast, Solas said. The statute inherently "requires inspection and copying," so disclosure can't be "commercial piracy."

Cavallaro knows his federal copyright argument is bunk, stretching a legal precedent that describes "infringement remedies" – Freedom of Information Act requests for federal investigative materials from the Kennedy assassination – into a "mandatory confidentiality statute," Solas wrote.

The third exemption Cavallaro floated to the AG's office is the biggest joke, considering he didn't even mention it when rejecting Solas's APRA request, she said. 

"Elizabeth Warren is not a Rhode Island official. CCRI is not her Senate office," Solas wrote. If that exemption "swallowed every email a federal campaign sends to a state employee, APRA would have a hole the size of every ActBlue blast in every .edu inbox in Rhode Island."