By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi’s signed agreement with the Judicial Conduct Committee to resolve the ethics case against her still leaves her fate unresolved as she disputes the facts the JCC assembled.
The former New Hampshire Supreme Court associate justice agrees that she committed ethics violations connected to her 2024 conversations with Pease Development Authority Board Chair Steve Duprey and former Gov. Chris Sununu, but at the same time she disagrees with the JCC’s description of those violations in its Summary Report.
“In short, the Summary Report does not provide all of the relevant facts, it overstates the seriousness of the violation, and it speculates about conduct not before the Committee,” Hantz Marconi’s attorney Richard Geurriero wrote.
Hantz Marconi’s signed stipulation and agreement with the JCC, first reported by NHPR’s Todd Bookman, clears the path for an end to the legal proceedings against the retired judge. The agreement does not impose any penalties on Hantz Marconi.
But the case is not over just yet. The JCC wants Hantz Marconi to pay for its investigation into her conduct, while she wants the JCC to pay for its investigation as well as her legal bills. According to Guerriero, the JCC first tried to pressure Hantz Marconi to settle the case and sign off on a factually wrong Summary Report sight unseen.
“Respectfully, former Associate Justice Hantz Marconi believes the Committee is not justified in commencing and prolonging these matters without any reasonable basis. As described above, from the very initiation of the active proceedings in November of 2025, she acknowledged the violation and agreed to sanctions. The Committee’s response was to propose a Stipulation and Agreement wherein she would be required to stipulate to a Summary Report of 3 ‘findings’ that she had not seen or reviewed and to which she would have no input, waive her appellate rights, and stipulate to a violation of law that she maintains she never committed,” Guerriero wrote.
The JCC Summary Report, which Hantz Marconi has now seen and disputes, as well as all of her other objections to the proceedings will be submitted to the New Hampshire Supreme Court for review and final decision.
According to Guerriero’s objection, the JCC’s report ignores the copious mitigating and exculpatory facts surrounding the whole saga. Hantz Marconi is accused of trying to get both Duprey and Sununu to intervene in the investigation into her husband, former Ports Director Geno Marconi, or provide her with privileged information about that investigation.
The problem with those accusations is that both Duprey and Sununu denied Hantz Marconi did anything wrong.
“When Duprey was contacted by investigators from the Attorney General’s Office and asked about Hantz Marconi’s call, Duprey explained, ‘she was being appropriately careful not to ask [him] for any details,’” Guerriero wrote. “Governor Sununu expressly stated that he saw nothing improper about the meeting. He said, ‘there was no ask, there was nothing Governor, I wish you could do this…there was nothing like that.’”
In fact, Rudolph Ogden was in the room for the June, 2024 meeting between Hantz Marconi and Sununu, and he backed up Sununu’s statement that nothing improper took place.
“[Ogden said] that ‘there was no request, or there was no do this, or do that.’ … To ‘be clear there was never a, this needs to end quickly and can you please ask DOJ to end this quickly. There was never anything like that,’” Guerriero wrote.
Ogden was then Sununu’s counsel, and he is now a Superior Court judge.
While Hantz Marconi agrees that the conversations lend themselves to an appearance of impropriety, which is enough for an ethics violation, those conversations in and of themselves were not improper according to the other parties. The JCC fails to include Ogden, Sununu, and Duprey’s full sentiments in its report, Guerriero wrote, leaving a false picture of what actually happened.
“The testimony of Sununu, Ogden, and Duprey deserves particular weight when reviewing Hantz Marconi’s conduct because all three were interviewed by investigators with the Attorney General’s Office as part of its investigation. Despite investigators pressing them, all three still said that they did not think Hantz Marconi had done anything improper. Therefore, an accurate factual summary should include their accounts of the phone call and meeting,” Guerriero wrote.
The JCC report mischaracterizes the no contest plea Hantz Marconi entered in 2025 to a Class B misdemeanor as part of a plea deal to end the criminal case against her, and it spends time considering the felony charges on which she was originally indicted. Those charges were disputed by Hantz Marconi, and later dropped as part of the plea agreement.
“In addition, the Summary Report emphasizes criminal indictments which were dropped yet makes no reference to the numerous challenges Hantz Marconi made to those indictments as detailed in her initial response to the JCC. The fact that the Attorney General obtained and then dropped seven indictments insinuating misconduct should not be a factor in the Committee’s decision, except to the extent those facts show that the Attorney General filed legally defective charges it could not prove,” Guerriero wrote.