requires honesty." The following day he said, "We aren't targeting scientific conclusions. That's not the issue. It's the expenditure of taxpayer dollars." The university responded on 5 May with a position statement which noted that four of the five named research grants were from federal organisations outside Virginia. The CID referred to FATA provisions on financial fraud, but Cuccinelli's comments in The Washington Post and the unusual nature of the CID "strongly suggest that the investigation is motivated primarily by differences of opinion regarding the scientific basis for current understanding of climate change." They considered his actions inappropriate in scientific inquiry; "His action and the potential threat of legal prosecution of scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer-review standards send a chilling message to scientists engaged in basic research involving Earth’s climate and indeed to scholars in any discipline. Such actions directly threaten academic freedom and, thus, our ability to generate the knowledge upon which informed public policy relies." Initial public reaction Academics and scientists said that Cuccinelli's demand threatened academic freedom. Mann said that he believed that Cuccinelli was "simply trying to smear me as part of a larger campaign to discredit my science". Nineteen professors at Virginia's Old Dominion University issued a statement saying that Cuccinelli's actions "echo some of the worst offenses of the McCarthy era", alluding to the anti-Communist investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. They demanded that he "cease and desist from this and further 'witch hunts' driven by partisan political agendas that waste valuable state resources in a difficult economy." U.Va.'s Faculty Senate issued a statement criticizing the investigation as being politically motivated and "an inappropriate way to engage with the process of scientific inquiry" which "directly threaten[s] academic freedom" by "send[ing] a chilling message to scientists engaged in basic research involving Earth's climate and indeed to scholars in any discipline." More than 800 state university and college faculty members signed a petition organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which said in a statement: "Much of Virginia's scientific and academic community is appalled that their attorney general has launched such a blatantly political investigation." The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and the American Association of University Professors also criticized Cuccinelli's actions, commenting in a joint letter that "it is hard to conceive of the Attorney General's request ... as anything but a "fishing expedition" aimed at discrediting Dr. Mann's conclusions, rather