Harp has a few albatrosses around her neck, one of which is
her deceased husband, a slum landlord by some accounts and a tax
scofflaw. Harp’s husband was given a walk-on role in the mayor’s last
campaign, which featured Justin Elicker, a Democrat who ran in a general
election against Harp as an Independent and did remarkably well, losing to Harp
55 to 45 percent. Elicker has said he will once again challenge Harp in a
general election as an Independent should he lose to her in an upcoming
Democrat primary.
In the meantime, Harp has struck back at her likely Democrat
primary opponent by implausibly accusing prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s
office in New Haven Natalie Elicker, Justin Elicker’s wife, of colluding with
President Donald Trump to deny the mayor her destined place in the sun, a
charge made “out of the blue,” Keating writes, by Harp campaign manager, Edward
Corey. The FBI is presently investigating corruption in New Haven City Hall,
and Corey has alleged a multipart conspiracy involving “President Donald
Trump’s Justice Department and the city’s Democratic town committee leaders.”
Corey’s charge was unambiguous; there was in it no room for
what the politicians sometimes call plausible deniability. “It is apparent,”
Corey huffed, “that candidate Justin Elicker had inside knowledge of the
investigation in city hall. Attorney Elicker clearly had her hand in manipulating
the FBI into moving forward, which is reminiscent of the FBI’s sloppy meddling
in the 2016 election. It is no surprise to me that Attorney Elicker is willing
to use the same tactics that got her boss elected, to get her husband elected.”
Corey assumed that “boss Trump” had appointed Natalie
Elicker to her position, but he was mistaken. The charge was absurd, said
husband Elicker, for two reasons: first, his wife handles only civil cases and
has no connection with the FBI; and second, her boss, the President who had
appointed her to her position, was not the offensive Trump, but rather the
inoffensive President Barack Obama.
Elicker did not mention that the charge Trump had colluded
with President of Russia Vladimir Putin to deny Democrat presidential aspirant
Hillary Clinton her destined place in the sun had been found, after a two year
investigation by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, to be meritless, except as
a political ploy that, in Connecticut, permitted Democrats to regain an
unassailable majority of seats in the state’s General Assembly. There are,
after all, limits to proper political discourse in Connecticut’s urban Democrat
hegemonies such as New Haven.
Corey’s boss took the drubbing cheerfully on the chin. “My
campaign staff,” said Harp, referring to Corey’s ham-fisted attempt to blacken
the reputation of both Mr. and Mrs. Elicker, “was very concerned and saw the
connection and sent it out. They are my campaign staff, so I can’t disavow it.”
Mrs. Elicker is no stranger to New Haven. In 2014, she
became the executive director of New Haven’s landmark Institute Library, Connecticut’s
oldest circulating library, and immediately began to generate
financing for both the Institute, and
the building in which it is housed, a Victorian structure designed by Rufus G.
Russell that opened for business in 1856. In addition, Mrs. Elicker repurposed
the library, restoring it to its initial luster as a salon that had invited
notable speakers -- including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Herman
Melville and Frederick Douglass, among others -- to address the wider
community.
The hit job on the wife of Harp’s chief Democrat political
opponent, easily dismissed by Harp as staff induced, may be the least of her
problems. Her platform for the city is lackluster, while Elicker’s reformist
message -- “more affordable housing, investing in public schools and youth
programs, strengthening neighborhoods, and battling against ‘predatory
landlords’ across the city,” according to Keating’s account -- is
considerably more muscular. The vow to battle predatory landlords and “an open
checkbook policy” insuring transparency by placing every city hall financial transaction
on the internet are especially wounding to a Harp administration that has
winked at her own family’s slum landlord background – hence the attack on
Elicker’s wife. If you’re losing support within New Haven’s rusty political
machine, it sometimes helps to raise your voice, and the attack on Elicker’s
wife is a scream of desperation.
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