Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan’s bid for the U.S. House is beginning to look like the inside of Pandora’s Box.
Those who have kept up with their Greek mythology will
recognize Pandora as the first woman, created from water and earth by
Hephaestus, the god of craftsmanship. At
her creation, she was endowed with many godly gifts: Athena draped her in rich
clothes; Aphrodite blessed her with beauty; Hermes bestowed on her the gift of
speech. But there was a problem.
Prometheus, whose name means forethought, had rebelled
against the gods on behalf of men, gifting them with fire and knowledge, for
which effrontery he was punished by Zeus, who presented Pandora to Prometheus’
brother, Epimetheus. Here, temptation entered the world. Given a beautiful box
and warned never to open it, her godly gifts -- most especially curiosity -- induced
her to open the box, at which point all the evils of the world flew out,
spreading over the earth and contaminating the race of men.
FBI investigations of political corruption often involve the
opening of political Pandora boxes.
Media curiosity – even saintly journalists are not free of
human imperfections -- has now alighted on “a key member of Speaker of the
House Chris Donovan’s legislative staff” who had refused “to cooperate with an internal investigation he
[former U.S. Attorney Stan Twardy] launched into alleged campaign finance law
violations in his [Mr. Donovan’s] 5th District Congress campaign,” according to one news report.
The Twardy investigation, which inferentially cleared Mr.
Dovovan of corruption, was considerably
hampered -- some would say rendered pointless -- by the refusal of principals under
investigation by the FBI, all associates of Mr. Donovan, to participate in the investigator’s
probe.
Among the refusenicks were Robert Braddock, Mr. Donovan’s
fired finance director, and Donovan campaign manager Josh Nassi – both of whom
were intimately involved with Mr. Donovan’s bid for the U.S. House in the 5th
District.
Could Ms. Jordan, one columnist queried,
have been “the conduit between the campaign and the powerful engine of doing
favors for friends in the speaker’s office? She was, until recently, in a close
personal relationship with fired Donovan campaign manager Joshua Nassi, who has
been identified as one of three co-conspirators with Braddock.”
Ms. Jordan, herself a lawyer, has now lawyered-up. In investigations
of this kind, lawyers interposed between possible political criminals and the
media serve the same purpose as did mail vests in the age of chivalry. The arrows
of outrageous fortune are sometimes prevented from striking a vital organ by
lawyers who advise their clients to refrain from talking with, among others,
Mr. Twardy. In the modern age, not patriotism but lawyers have become the last
refuge of scoundrels.
In the meantime, the probe continues, as does Mr. Donovan’s
limping campaign for the U.S. Congress.
A Grand Jury indictment, according to a report,
“lays out an alleged conspiracy
between Braddock, Raymond Soucy, a top corrections union official [who has now
requested early retirement], three unidentified roll-your-own shop owners and
two other campaign aides, identified by sources as Joshua Nassi and Sarah Waterfall, to provide money for the
campaign in exchange for House Speaker Donovan killing the bill.”
The indictment,according to another report, fleshes out charges made in an earlier
affidavit that secured the arrest of Mr. Braddock and brings Mr. Donovan close
to the conspiracy to fraudulently disguise campaign contributions for the
purpose of affecting legislation that would impact roll your own in
Connecticut: “It shows that there was discussion among tobacco store owners and
another individual identified as a conspirator of channeling tens of thousands
of dollars to Donovan's campaign. One such discussion took place, according to
the indictment, outside a Meriden restaurant in November just moments before
two roll-your-own store owners were scheduled to meet with Donovan.”
If the Twardy report
was an awkward attempt to review the Elizabethan age without mentioning the
contributions of Queen Elizabeth or the plays of William Shakespeare, the
Braddock indictment brings the principal actors associated with Donovan on stage in more
explicit roles.
Here we see Mr.
Soucy telling two roll your own unindicted co-conspirators prior to a meeting
he had arranged with Mr. Donovan that neither should mention any bills because "the
men in black running around . . . all the time . . . and we say, 'hey, we don't
want you to do this bill,' . . . that's the same as me giving him a twenty,
hundred dollar bill, 'let me go on the (expletive) two ounces you got me
with'."
Following the Braddock
indictment, Mr. Donovan’s new campaign manager – Tom Swan, executive director
of the once non-partisan Connecticut Citizen Action Group, now a shill for
Democratic Party mackerels shining in the moonlight – dispensed the usual palliatives,
while Mr. Donovan’s campaign spokesman Gabe Rosenberg assured the media that “Nothing
in this indictment is inconsistent with the findings of the independent Twardy
report.”
Singing canaries are everywhere, and threats of prosecution likely have
them sharing with the FBI information they have withheld from Mr. Twardy.
Despite repeated calls for Mr. Donovan to drop his campaign for the U.S.
Congress -- none issuing from Governor Dannel Malloy, a former prosecutor and
the titular head of the Democratic Party -- Mr. Donovan is moving forward
resolutely into the continuing crisis.
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