An unwelcomed Christmas present for Louisville and its police department, The Courier Journal filed an open records lawsuit in Jefferson Circuit Court on Wednesday.

The Courier alleges that the city and LMPD officials/employees willfully concealed 750,000 public records in the Explorer Scout investigation to which the newspaper was entitled.

The city and LMPD will now have to answer to the courts and the public for concealing the records and lying about their existence, avoiding the creation of records that are subject to the open records law, and transferring the records to a federal agency not subject to the open records law — the FBI — all to evade public accountability for its handling of the Explorer sexual misconduct scandal.