There is a hole in the state’s clean election law. Rigorously
observed, the law is supposed to prevent state politicians from wresting
campaign contributions from contractors and other business associates whom political
officials oversee. The hole is quite legal, but it violates what ethicists sometimes
call the “spirit of Connecticut’s clean election law.” The clean election law
was adopted in Connecticut soon after then Governor John Rowland was sent
packing to prison for the first time on corruption charges.
The hole most recently became apparent when Attorney General
George Jepsen, once Chairman of the state Democratic Party, persuaded a host of
Connecticut lobbyists, business executives and deep pocket one-percenters to
cough up campaign contributions for Mark Herring, a friend of Jepsen who finds
himself in a tight race for Attorney General of Virginia. The controversy surrounding Jepsen
and Herring may or may not be – the reader must forgive the irresistible pun --
a red-herring.
“It’s all perfectly legal,” Hartford Courant investigative
reporter Jon Lender writes in a recent story,
“and the contributions have been listed, as required by law, on the latest
campaign-financing report of the Virginians for Mark Herring campaign
committee… But the episode still raises the question of whether Jepsen’s
actions are consistent with his longstanding expressions of support for
Connecticut clean-election laws designed to eliminate ‘even the appearance of
[an elected official] being beholden to special interest groups.’”
There are two dangers when politicians who have built their
careers as white knights by denouncing the appearance of corruption are found
flirting with corruption. First, not everyone is a lawyer who understands and
profits from vagaries in written laws. Most people who voted for Jepsen as a
welcome change from his predecessor Dick Blumenthal, now a U.S. Senator, do
not specialize in subtleties and so may not always distinguish the “appearance
of corruption” from corruption itself. The second danger is that where there is a hole
in the law, there may be a loophole.
About sixteen months ago, Governor Dannel Malloy – like
Jepsen, a lawyer – sought to take advantage of a loophole in Connecticut clean
election law, which forbids the politically favored from favoring politicians
with “illegal” campaign contributions.
The law is written in such a way as to require Connecticut politicians or their party to pay
for costs associated with their own political mailers. Malloy signed off on a
campaign mailer that had at its bottom a fly-speck notice detailing
instructions to polling places. A copy of one of the artfully contrived
mailers is shown above.
Then Republican Party Chairman Jerry Labriola asked for a ruling
from Connecticut’s State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) on what
he regarded as a campaign advertisement that had violated the state’s clean election laws. Eventually, after the Democrat Party threatened to appeal an
adverse ruling from the SEEC in court, the Party agreed to settle the matter by
paying a substantial fine of $325,000. Malloy’s lawyers argued that the notice
at the bottom of the campaign mailer federalized the document, immunizing it
against Connecticut’s clean campaign laws.
“The party,” CTMirror reported at the time,
“admitted no wrongdoing and the settlement characterized the $325,000 as ‘a
voluntary payment,’ one roughly equivalent to the value of the disputed
expenditures.”
It was a near noose. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Democrats avoided having to disclose possibly embarrassing e-mails in a
discovery process had the case gone to trial, and Michael Brandi, the general
counsel and executive director of the elections commission, gave assurance that
“the [Democrat] party agrees to new guidelines that resolve a significant
conflict in state and federal election law and [to] end litigation that could
have produced a court ruling curtailing the ability of state regulators to
enforce the Rowland-era campaign reforms enshrined in the Citizens’ Election
Program.”
House Minority Leader Themis Klarides remarked, “They can
call it whatever they want, but the $325,000 fine is unprecedented and proves
the seriousness of this violation of the law.” The previous SEEC record settlement
was a puny $20,000. People who were not lawyers, watching from the sidelines, sensed
that some foul beast had dragged a bloody corpse through Connecticut’s clean
election law house.
Asked whether he had violated the principle or spirit of
Connecticut’s clean election law by procuring for his friend campaign dollars
from people whose business activities he might someday oversee, Jepsen replied,
“It’s self-evident that I don’t benefit directly from it, and if the
legislature had wanted to prohibit this kind of activity they certainly could
have done so, but they did not...They chose to draw the line where they did.”
U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro regularly and munificently
contributes to other more needy Democrats across the nation from her own
campaign coffer excesses. National Democrats regularly employ her husband to do
research and polling for them, so that the money that goes around comes around,
sooner or later, to DeLauro’s bank account -- all perfectly legal, but not
quite above board ethically.
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