A reporter for CorpCounsel magazine and its parent, ALM Media, filed a motion (PDF) in federal court Tuesday seeking to unseal the confidential corporate monitor reports for American International Group, Inc., starting just before and during the U.S. financial crisis of 2008.

AIG’s financial dealings helped to trigger that crisis, as well as the $182 billion, taxpayer-funded bailout that followed. The hired consultant who authored the reports from 2005 to 2009 is attorney James Cole, now the U.S. deputy attorney general in the Obama administration.

“The reports are important to a full and accurate understanding of AIG’s role in creating the country’s ongoing economic predicament and to the experience and qualifications of the Obama official, who currently is second in command at the U.S. Department of Justice,” the motion states. “Yet they are shielded from public view even though AIG is essentially a government-owned corporation.”

The motion was prepared by attorney Joshua Wheeler, of the Thomas Jefferson Center For The Protection Of Free Expression, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, with assistance from students in the University of Viginia's law school clinic.

Cole’s former law partner, who currently is AIG’s monitor, and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opposed unsealing the records. The case is before U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington, D.C.

This reporter had tried informally to see the reports but was refused. Cole was nominated as deputy AG in 2010, and some members of Congress questioned the nomination because of his role as AIG monitor.

CorpCounsel then formally requested the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Justice on January 6, 2011, because the monitor provision had been contained in a deferred prosecution agreement that AIG signed with Justice. But two months later, the DOJ referred the reporter to the SEC.

After CorpCounsel filed an FOIA request with the SEC on March 9, 2011, the agency replied on April 29 that Judge Kessler had sealed the documents during the SEC’s suit against AIG, first filed in 2004. Attorneys for both the SEC and AIG filed a joint motion in 2006 asking that the reports be sealed.

This reporter then wrote the court, asking Judge Kessler to unseal the records. The judge agreed to hear motions on the matter.

“As a member of the public and the press, intervener Sue Reisinger (‘Movant’) has presumptive First Amendment and common law rights of access to the reports,” the motion states.

It continues: “The government’s monitoring of AIG has too easily avoided the transparency it deserves. The reports are of significant and ongoing public interest and should be disclosed.”

In their joint motion opposing the unsealing, AIG and the SEC state, “The Commission and AIG oppose the application on the grounds that (i) the reports of which Applicant seeks public release are not ‘judicial records’ subject to a First Amendment or common law presumption of access, and (ii) release would be inconsistent with the need for confidentiality, which was the basis for the Court’s order allowing dissemination of the reports only upon ‘leave of this Court, for good cause shown.’ ”