Grants Pass City Councilor Erich Schloegl has placed himself in a controversy of his own making, amplifying a records request that was never public until he himself brought it to light. In a social media post this week, Schloegl accused the Grants Pass Tribune and its publisher, John Oliver Riccio, of unlawfully attempting to access confidential veterans’ records. The accusation was baseless, but it succeeded in doing something no one else had managed: it turned a routine, unpublicized records request into a public spectacle.
What Schloegl did not say in his post is equally important. Roughly a month earlier, at the direction of a concerned Josephine County resident, the Tribune submitted a lawful public records request to determine whether any county employees or elected officials were potentially violating Oregon law by misusing veteran status or benefits. The request was never fulfilled, nor was it ever reported in print or online by the Tribune. Instead, the Josephine County Board of Commissioners forwarded details of the request to the very individuals it pertained to. In doing so, they bypassed the proper process and handed political allies ammunition for retaliation.
Schloegl seized that information, publishing it on his official social media page and portraying himself as the victim of a privacy breach. Yet no records were obtained, no information was published, and no story was ever written. The only reason the public now knows about the request is because Schloegl made it public himself. By doing so, he created the very controversy he now claims to be suffering under.
This incident was not isolated. Just one day earlier, Oregon State Representative Dwayne Yunker employed the same tactic, blasting out on social media that he too had been targeted by records requests supposedly linked to the Tribune. Yunker’s message carried the same tone of grievance, the same deflection of blame, and the same disregard for the fact that nothing had actually been disclosed. Both officials took private, unfulfilled requests and turned them into political weapons.
The timing of these attacks cannot be dismissed as coincidence. They came within hours of the long-anticipated recall announcement against Josephine County Commissioners Chris Barnett and Andreas Blech. Faced with a serious challenge to their political survival, Barnett, Yunker, Schloegl, and their allies within the local Republican Central Committee appear to have coordinated a counter-offensive: distract the public, shift the narrative, and paint the independent press as the real threat.
For the Grants Pass Tribune, this pattern of behavior is all too familiar. Riccio has repeatedly been made the “patsy” for broader political battles in the county, targeted whenever the establishment seeks to divert attention from its own controversies. By casting the newspaper as the villain, these officials attempt to delegitimize scrutiny and divide the community. It is a calculated strategy—accuse first, smear loudly, and hope the public overlooks the timing.
But the facts are plain. The Tribune never received the requested documents. It never published a story based on them. And it never named the officials involved. That chain of events only became public because Yunker and Schloegl made it so. They revealed their own involvement, then used that revelation to launch an attack on the very institution tasked with holding government accountable.
This is more than political theater—it raises serious ethical concerns. If elected officials can intercept records requests, funnel them to the subjects of those requests, and then use that information to smear the press, the integrity of public transparency in Josephine County is in question. The law provides citizens the right to request records without fear of retaliation. That principle is undermined when those in power weaponize the process.
The orchestrated campaign by Schloegl and Yunker highlights a deeper problem within the county’s political leadership. Their coordinated deflections, paired with Barnett’s history of online attacks against critics, reveal a pattern: when threatened, the cabal circles its wagons, points fingers, and manufactures distractions. In this case, the distraction is designed to overshadow the recall effort that could reshape Josephine County’s leadership.
By making themselves the story, Schloegl and Yunker have only heightened public scrutiny. Their efforts to appear as victims expose a deeper truth: the real danger to trust and integrity is not posed by journalists asking questions, but by elected officials who retaliate against those who dare to ask them.
In the end, the spectacle they created underscores the stakes of the moment. The recall against Barnett and Blech is about accountability, transparency, and leadership. The diversionary tactics of their allies may delay the conversation, but they cannot erase the fact that the county’s political establishment is facing a reckoning. And this time, it is not the Tribune that put them in the hot seat—it is their own actions.