Dan Roberti, a Democrat running for the U.S House in Connecticut’s 5th District has called upon Democratic Party nominee Chris Donovan to quit the race.
"It is time for Chris Donovan to withdraw from the primary
race for the good of the Connecticut Democratic Party and to protect the seat,”
Mr. Roberti said following an indictment returned by a Grand Jury of Mr. Donovan’s
former campaign director Robert Braddock. “He has hidden behind lawyers and
never stepped up to explain how members of his campaign staff could have
arranged conduit contributions without his knowledge."
Following Mr. Roberti’s invitation to withdraw, Donovan
campaign manager Tom Swan declared that Mr. Donovan remains, even after damning
disclosures, the strongest Democrat in the race.
Mr. Donovan was nominated at the Democratic convention for
the 5th District seat now occupied by U.S. Representative Chris
Murphy, the Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate seat that will be
vacated when present Senator Joe Lieberman leaves office.
"We have a clear path to victory in August and
November," Mr. Swan said.
Formerly a union organizer, Mr. Donovan has received the
backing of union groups in the state that also have announced their formal
support of Mr. Murphy’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
Mr. Donovan was nominated by his party when the campaign
financing scandal was a tiny cloud no bigger than a finger tip on the political
horizon. Following the nomination, the cloud has grown to menacing proportions and
now threatens to blot out the shining Democratic campaign sun. Since Dannel
Malloy was wafted into office on a promise of shared sacrifice, Connecticut has
become, for all practical political purposes, a one party state, and there is
little doubt among campaign watchers and too clever by half Democratic Party
operatives that voter inertia and political force majeure exerted by office
holding Democrats will largely determine the outcome of the upcoming elections.
The published indictment of Mr. Braddock does not help Mr.
Donovan’s campaign. In both an earlier affidavit and now in the indictment, Mr.
Braddock has been accused of conspiring to accept conduit campaign contributions,
illegal donations falsely made by one person in the name of another.
It is, however, the disquieting details included both in the
affidavit supporting Mr. Braddock’s arrest and the recently released Grand Jury
indictment that should cause Democrats in the state to contemplate getting
together a delegation of politicos that might convince Mr. Donovan to take a
bullet for his party.
According to the Braddock indictment,
the roll your own scandal was a spin off investigation of an earlier federal
probe concerning “the way federal money has been spent to remove lead paint
from the homes of low-income families.” Federal investigators had discovered
that one of the people who had signed an illegal conduit check for the Donovan
campaign was connected with a business under investigation in the lead paint
removal program. In investigations of this kind, one thing leads to another,
and soon the best laid plans of mice and men are torn asunder.
The scorpion’s stings in the conduit campaign contribution
scandal remain hidden. Mr. Braddock’s indictment, according to one report, suggest more shoes are to drop, “including the
possibility that the FBI arranged to have union activist Ray Soucy wear a wire
to record a conversation with Donovan at the Democratic State Convention about
accepting illegal contributions in exchange for killing a piece of legislation
related to ‘roll your own’ tobacco shops.”
Mr. Soucy – like Mr. Donovan before his election to the
House, a good portion of which has been spent as a Speaker steering bills
through the legislative sausage maker– was a union operative before he was caught
up in the FBI investigation centering on members of Mr. Donavan’s campaign
staff. It was Mr. Soucy – co-conspirator 1 (CC1) in the affidavit that secured
his arrest – who coached two roll your own store owners under investigation for
a meeting with Mr. Donovan by cautioning them not to mention pending bills
relating to roll you own shops in Connecticut. Eyes and ears were everywhere,
Mr. Soucy advised: “… there is always people following this guy around,
watching what he's doing …" During their meeting inside a restaurant, the tobacco
owners, Mr. Donovan’s arrested former finance director and Mr. Donovan discussed
“various issues relating to the roll your own industry in Connecticut,"
according to the Grand Jury indictment.
Was Mr. Soucy, already deeply implicated in the scandal,
wired during conversations he might have had with Donovan? Were other co-conspirators
wired when they conspired with Mr. Soucy? Is Mr. Soucy, under threat of
prosecution, the only singing canary serenading prosecutors? Where are the
scorpion stingers? What does the FBI know, and when did it know it?
Barring leaks from behind the thus far leak-proof barricades,
answers to these questions may not be forthcoming before the election. Until
such questions can be answered with some degree of certitude, those within the Democratic
Party who owe Mr. Donovan their silence and a studied indifference to possible political
repercussions will consider themselves safe from provocative criticism.
And later?
Later is for later. In a free country, professional politicians
who winked at the damaging data in both the affidavit securing the arrest of
Mr. Braddock and the Grand Jury indictment can always plead ignorance. And in
the bluest state in the Northeast, the penalties assigned for willful ignorance
are mild and survivable.
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