Congress Warned the Pentagon About VMI

By Mike Staso, VMI ’79 and Aric Southworth, VMI ’94

A New Lawsuit Alleges Its Board Was Already Governing in Secret.

When five members of Virginia’s congressional delegation — Representatives Ben Cline, Robert Wittman, H. Morgan Griffith, Jen Kiggans, and John McGuire, later joined by Rep. Gregory Murphy — wrote to the President and the Secretary of War in March, their warning was structural, not partisan.

The Virginia Military Institute, they noted, is one of only six federally recognized Senior Military Colleges operating under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, and state legislation restructuring its Board of Visitors (HB1374) and standing up a task force to scrutinize its military mission (HB1377) “sets a dangerous precedent of state overreach.”

Parallel appeals to POTUS and the SecWar by the organizations Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS) and the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA), each tying VMI’s governance stability to federal reliance interests under 10 U.S.C. § 2111a and the commissioning pipelines the Armed Forces depend on.

A verified petition filed June 1, 2026, in the Circuit Court for York County now suggests those federal warnings landed on an administration in Richmond and a board at VMI dominated by Governor Spanberger’s appointees that, according to the filing, was conducting its business in the dark.

What the petition alleges

In Robert C. Morris, Jr. v. Virginia Military Institute, et al., Case No. CL26005973-00, the petitioner seeks a writ of mandamus under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

The petition — sworn under penalty of perjury — alleges that VMI Board of Visitors members held unnoticed electronic “meetings” by reply-all email and text message, including, it states, the day after the board’s own FOIA officer reminded members in writing that such conduct was unlawful, and after formal FOIA training that specifically warned them not to “Reply All.”

The filing further alleges that VMI produced no records at all from board member Donald L. Hall — who, the petition says, publicly described himself as the main negotiator of the recent VMI actions with Governor Abigail Spanberger and the General Assembly, and who reportedly told a full board meeting that former Governor Ralph Northam “was more involved than anyone in this room knows other than me.”

According to the petition, the production also contained no records from Northam, withheld voicemails and call logs, and redacted the names of email senders and recipients. It alleges the FOIA officer altered an online portal entry to replace his own name with the anonymous label “Staff,” and that a professional process server hired to deliver public comments was turned away from open committee meetings and falsely told they were closed.

Currently, the Court has not adjudicated any of these allegations, and the respondents are entitled to answer them in Court.

Where the allegations meet settled Law

What gives the petition weight, according to the petition, is that the conduct it describes maps onto questions Virginia’s courts and its FOIA Council have already addressed. On physical access, the Court has construed FOIA’s guarantee of “free entry” as the ability to make an unobstructed entrance into a meeting. On withholding, the Court has held the personnel-records exemption “narrowly limited to those employed by the government”.

The asymmetry is worth noticing.

Here the threads converge. In a letter dated May 28, 2026, John G. Rocovich, Jr., the Rector of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors, recounted that the Secretary of the Commonwealth had called, “purportedly on behalf of Governor Abigail Spanberger,” to request his resignation — followed by a letter bearing the Governor’s signature.

Rocovich refused, noting that under Virginia Code § 23.1-1300, a governor may remove a board member only for cause, in writing, and the Governor stated no such cause. He pointedly quoted the Governor’s own pre-inauguration statement, as reported by The Washington Post, that “the governor’s role is to appoint people. That’s it,” and that she would “largely not interact with board members after appointing them.”

That is the contrast the public record now presents. At Virginia Tech (VT), with its Corps of Cadets and Title 10 Senior Military College (SMC) designation, the executive branch moved swiftly to push out a long-serving rector without the statutory cause the Law requires.

Board members and the FOIA officer at VMI—another Title 10 SMC accused of secret meetings, withheld records, and an altered public record—remain seated, none suspended, while a citizen’s lawsuit proceeds. VMI and VT, two of only six SMCs, are the only ones with these controversies stemming from the State Government, and both are in Virginia.

Readers can decide for themselves what principle reconciles the two.

Why the defense community should watch

The members of Congress, STARRS, and AFSA grounded their concern in a single proposition: the Nation relies on the governance continuity and institutional integrity of its Senior Military Colleges.

A lawsuit alleging that one such college’s board conducted public business off the books and then resisted disclosure speaks directly to that reliance interest. The petition does not ask anyone to presume guilt; it asks a court to compel the records that would answer the open questions — including whether state officials, current or former, shaped VMI’s recent course out of public view.

The VMI petition is not the only recent case testing how Virginia treats its military-connected students and institutions.

As Stars and Stripes reported on June 3, 2026, a Virginia National Guard member training to become a military chaplain, joined by two fellow students, has appealed Johnson v. Fleming to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, alleging that Virginia violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by excluding students pursuing religious or theological degrees from the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant and the Virginia National Guard Tuition Assistance Grant.

The named defendants include the director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia — the same agency whose 2021 report on VMI the General Assembly invoked to justify the HB1377 task force‘s reinvestigation of VMI. Retired Army chaplains’ chiefs filed a brief supporting the service member, noting that the federal government has funded the very course of study that Virginia declined to support.

Read alongside the VMI petition, the two cases invite a single question for the defense community: whether the Commonwealth’s recent treatment of its military-connected institutions and service members reflects a consistent regard for the federal interests at stake and whether the VMI board is a willing participant. Readers can judge for themselves.