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June 3, 2012

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Gibbons threatened with another lawsuit

By (contact)

Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008 | 5:35 p.m.

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The attorney for the state employee suing Gov. Jim Gibbons for firing her is threatening to sue the governor and top aides again, this time over statements made about her firing.

In Saturday's story with the Las Vegas Sun, Budget Director Andrew Clinger said that a senior budget office employee's dismissal was “work-performance related. I don’t want to get into specifics of why. It’s definitely not anything to do with the reasons she’s alleging.”

Cal Dunlap, in letters sent to Gibbons, Clinger and press secretary Ben Kieckhefer, called the statements "false and defamatory."

According to the lawsuit, Mary Keating was fired in May for flagging 867 text messages Gibbons sent to a woman on his state cell phone. He later reimbursed Clinger $130 for the calls.

The lawsuit said that an unnamed source told Keating that Gibbons believed she talked to the press.

The letter sent Thursday afternoon to the state said Keating was not given a "real reason" for her firing when the action happened. She and her attorney

also sent letters to Clinger and Gibbons, but never received a response.

"Not only was there no job performance issue, but any claim at this juncture that there was such an issue is contrived," the letter said.

It demands that Clinger, Kieckhefer and Gibbons retract the statement, or else be subjected to punitive damages.

Kieckhefer, the governor's spokesman, said he had not received a copy of the letter yet.

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