A Honesdale Borough appointee offered to help us expose corruption in Wayne County — on one condition. Then the Bar Association quietly put some of the records back.
On July 6, Pocono Review published “The Vanishing Legal Journal,” documenting that someone at the Wayne County Bar Association spent 19 minutes deleting 15 years of the county’s official legal record from public view — two days after this outlet’s most widely read story about Wayne County’s courts. The reporting rested on the site’s own WordPress metadata, 91 consecutive 404 errors, and Wayback Machine snapshots anyone can check.
What followed was not a correction request. It was a negotiation, then a threat, then a scramble.
The Offer
Richard “Rick” Geis is an Alternate Member of the Honesdale Borough Civil Service Commission, the body that governs police hiring, promotion, and discipline for the borough. His term runs through December 31, 2026.
His Facebook profile doesn’t say that. It says he “works at The beautiful Borough of Honesdale, Pennsylvania.” Not the commission. Not the appointment. Just a vague, almost decorative description of the place. His name does not appear in any of the public records, nonprofit filings, tax documents, or court dockets we’ve reviewed across this investigation. Whatever connection he has to the institutions he’s defending, it isn’t visible in the documentary record.
He opened with an offer: “I am here to help you get the truth out but I can’t support you unless you remove the post and do a retraction.”
His complaint was that our article falsely blamed the Wayne County Courthouse for the deletions. The article never mentions the courthouse. It names the Wayne County Bar Association — a private nonprofit — and states plainly: “We can’t prove any of them did, which is exactly why we’re putting their names on the record.”
We told him so, and invited him to read it.
The Threat
He escalated.
“What you are doing is attacking a small business here in the area that is who I am defending,” he wrote — identifying himself, unprompted, as a party with a relationship to the work in question rather than a neutral observer.
Then the insults. “You got me on the technical education so it’s fair to say you are stupid and I want to mention dangerous when it comes to reporting. Why don’t you stick to the IT and resign from journalism.”
Then came the offer, and it had two halves.
If we cooperated: “I thought if I can find one once of legitimacy I could help you expose a lot of the corruption here in Wayne and even defend this news outlet.” Tips, and a public vouch. He’d stop calling us fake news and start telling people we were real.
If we didn’t: “You will be discredited by others if you continue to post fake news.”
And then, in his own words, the terms: “I’ll make you a deal I will not fire my IT guy if you get out of the felonious news business.”
That sentence raises questions.
Who is his IT guy? He didn’t say. In the same exchange he told us we could “call the website designer” to verify his account of the WCBA rebuild — and offered to provide the contact information. Are those the same person?
But whoever the IT guy is, Geis says he can fire him. That is not the language of a bystander. It’s the language of a client, or an employer, or someone with authority over the work. And he offered that person’s job as the currency in a deal with a newsroom: stop reporting, and I won’t fire him.
He never mentioned the borough seat. Not in the messages, not in the comments, not on the profile he was posting from. We had to go find it.
Which business is he defending? What’s his stake in it? He hasn’t said.
What He Accidentally Confirmed
The most revealing line in his message wasn’t a threat. It was an endorsement.
“Take down this poor excuse for a news article admit you were wrong (people like the truth) lick your wounds and continue exposing the fraud.”
Continue exposing the fraud.
It seems like he isn’t disputing this outlet’s body of reporting. It reads like he’s affirming it. Everything we published up to the moment we documented what happened to the WCBA’s website — in Geis’s own telling, legitimate. Worth doing. Fraud worth exposing.
The only story he wants killed is the one that touches whatever he’s defending.
The Denial That Deleted Itself
Deborah Bailey owns Bailey Design & Advertising in Honesdale. She is not a peripheral figure in this story. Her firm co-publishes the Wayne County Legal Journal alongside the WCBA — her company’s name appears on the masthead of every issue, and the WCBA’s own site lists her phone number as the journal’s subscription contact. She is the publisher of record for the exact archive that vanished.
Whether Bailey Design also performed the website work is a question worth answering. What we can report is what she did next.
Bailey appeared in the comments on our Facebook post to state the files were not deleted:
Roughly thirty seconds later, before anyone could respond, she deleted the comment.
We have the screenshot.
Her comment is a direct factual claim about the central finding of our reporting — a finding supported by the site’s own timestamps, hundreds of dead files, and Internet Archive snapshots. She made the claim publicly, then withdrew it before anyone could ask her what she meant by it.
Bailey Design has published this journal for at least 15 years. If anyone would know what happened to fifteen years of it, and whether backups exist, it’s the publisher.
The Talking Point
A third account, Ted Miller, posted on the same thread: “WARNING WARNING NOT REAL NEWS. The truth of the situation is that part of the Wayne County’s Bar Association web page that contains the Legal Journal is down for a more user friendly format.”
“Down for a more user friendly format.” Miller also insisted, twice, that the redesign was “planned 6 months ago.”
Same claim Geis made privately. Same claim Bailey started to make publicly before pulling it back.
What Nobody Disputed
Not one of them said the timestamps were wrong. Not one said the 404 errors didn’t happen. Not one said the June 9 session was fabricated. Not one produced a contract, an invoice, a proposal, or an email — anything dated before June 7 that would show a redesign was scheduled before our court reporting ran.
What they’ve offered is an explanation. It raises more questions than it settles.
If this was a professional redesign, why was it happening on the live site? Redesigns get built on staging and pushed to production when they’re finished. That’s standard practice. A live rebuild on the site that serves the county’s legally required public notices would be an unusual choice — and if that’s what happened, it’s worth asking who approved it.
And why would a redesign touch the PDFs at all? The journals are files sitting in a directory. A theme change doesn’t move them. A new page builder doesn’t delete them. They don’t care what the site looks like. Yet 91 of them, from 2024 and 2025 alone, return 404 errors — while every 2026 file is still live. If a migration did that, we’d like to see how.
And what happened on June 9? Fifteen empty year-archive pages, created one at a time, in reverse chronological order, over 19 minutes. That doesn’t look like a file transfer. It looks like someone working through a list.
The May 28 and June 2 timestamps are consistent with a rebuild. June 9 isn’t. It’s a separate session, and it happened two days after we published.
Nobody has explained it.
Then They Put Some of It Back
Between July 7 and July 9 — four days after our article ran — the WCBA created four new archive pages restoring the journals for 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. We confirmed it through the site’s own REST API while it was happening.
The new pages carry “-2” slugs. They are not the June 9 stubs refilled; they are brand-new pages built alongside the empty ones. And they went up in the same pattern as the deletion: newest year first, working backward, over two days.
Ted Miller pointed to those restored pages as proof we were wrong. “Then why can I view the first 3 years of the Journal when I go to view it RIGHT NOW?”
He was pointing at pages that didn’t exist when our article ran.
Eleven years remain gone. 2011 through 2021. A decade of estate notices, sheriff’s sales, incorporation filings, and court opinions — the legal record that creditors, heirs, and homeowners paid to have made permanently public — is still dark, more than a month after it disappeared.
If the plan was always to restore everything in a friendlier format, there’s no reason the newest four years came back within days of a news story while the older eleven sit empty.
Every person who has come forward to call this reporting fake news has the answer to at least one of the questions in this article. Not one has offered a document.
We don’t take people’s word for it. That’s the entire job.
The offer stands: if anyone connected to the WCBA, Bailey Design, or the website rebuild wants to provide documentation of the redesign timeline, we will publish it in full. If the WCBA restores the full 2011–2021 archive, this article will be updated immediately to say so.
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