Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

I’d like to thank Dennis Swanton for inviting me here.  I want to touch on two areas of interest tonight, national and state government --they impinge on each other -- and end with a prayer to God to save us from ourselves. Otto von Bismarck used to say “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Let us hope it’s true. We’ll need a little divine intervention if Connecticut is to survive as a prosperous and welcoming state.  If you feel inclined to chuckle along the way, don’t restrain yourselves. Laughter is therapeutic. I’m hoping we might be able to bat around some questions in the Q&A that will follow. “All politics is local,” said Speaker of the US House Tip O’Neill. The phrase is pretty common, though it is most often associated with O’Neill, President Ronald Reagan’s Democrat counterpart in the glorious -- for conservative Republicans -- 1980’s. In many other ways, the 80s were a painful regurgitation of the 60s.  I’m ...

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the Hoffmans have reached a settlement on the three-year-old case. Blumenthal’s press release following the settlement is written in his usual triumphant mode. The case was a losing proposition for Hoffmans going in, and it is instructive to ask why. The final settlement, reached after years of litigation, demonstrates that the forces arrayed against the Hoffmans – which include, by the way, a compliant media – could not be overcome. Never-the-less, some battles are worth fighting, if only to make a record that would not exist when one chooses simply to lie down in the path of an irresistible force. In the Hoffman case – and more strikingly in the New England Pellet (NEP) case – some of Blumenthal’s questionable methods were closely scrutinized by this blog. The attorney general’s methods are as simple and effective as those employed in 15th century by the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, who was inclined to settle matters of religious...

In what Courant reporter Dave Altimari called “a stunning verdict ,” a Superior Court jury in Waterbury yesterday awarded Gina Malapanis, owner of Computers Plus Center Inc., $18 million after finding that state officials had “ruined her business with false claims that she had broken her state contract.” In a press release sent to various state newspapers in March 2003, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced that he was “pursuing law enforcement actions related to contractor irregularities” against Malapanis’ company. Blumenthal claimed the company had installed generic memory chips in computers sold to the state rather than chips installed by the computer maker and demanded $1.7 million from Malapanis in a civil action. Blumenthal also worked in tandem with Connecticut’s Chief State Attorney and the Department Of Information Technology (DOIT). In a parallel criminal action, Malapanis was arrested at her home by Hebron police. But the charges were dropped after her busin...

Blumenthal And The Abuse Of Ex Parte Attachments There is no rule on earth, Cardinal Henry Newman once said, to which there is not at least one exception. Ex parte attachments of assets may best be viewed as an exception to the 14th amendment to the U. S. Constitution. That amendment, in its procedural due process clause, secures the citizens of the United States in their property, which ordinarily cannot be seized by agents of the state without a hearing before a judge. The 14th amendment requires the state to ensure that no one is deprived of "life, liberty, or property" without a fair opportunity to affect the judgment or result. The exception is necessary because those accused of crimes – when found guilty – are called upon to surrender their assets as a part of their punishment, and an ex parte attachment prevents accused persons from disposing of their assets through fraudulent transfers or, in the case of drug kingpins, mobsters and career criminals, by using ...

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) awarded Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal a dubious distinction. Citing four categories – Dubious Dealings, Fabricating Law, AG Imperialism/Usurping Legislative Powers and Predatory Practices – Blumenthal was crowned “the worst attorney general in the United States.” He had some fierce competition: Eliot Spitzer, New York’s attorney general, had not yet been toppled from his hobby horse by consorting with prostitutes. Among the categories not mentioned by CEI was the misuse of fraudulent affidavits to secure from judges ex parte seizures of assets. An ex parte proceeding permits judges to invest prosecutors with the authority to seize the assets of persons they are investigating -- without a hearing before a judge. Two cases now wending their way through various courts, one involving a tea and herb vendor and the other a wood pellet distributor, graphically demonstrate Blumenthal’s abuse of ex parte attachment...

Connecticut's assistant attorneys general and other officials connected with the prosecution of David Hoffman are being sued in a Maine Court. This suit," accoring to papers filed with the court, "arises out of an ex parte attachment secured by Defendants in a Maine court against a Maine resident with the support of a false affidavit drafted by one of the individual Defendants, followed by the filing of a lis pendens in a Maine Registry of Deeds regarding the Property, which is located in Maine. "Plaintiffs have alleged that all the Defendants acted together in creating the false affidavit, pursuing the Maine Action and filing the lis pendens with full knowledge that there was no legal or factual basis to do so and for the improper purpose of pressuring Mrs. Hoffman into accepting an unfair and unreasonable resolution to the Connecticut Action concurrently being pursued by Defendants against Mrs. Hoffman and certain of her businesses, but not against Plaintiffs....

I Cried For A Year In March, 2009, Mathew Fitzsimmons, an assistant attorney general in Attorney General Dick Blumenthal’s office, found himself peppered by a battery of uncomfortable questions in Judge James Bentivegna’s Superior Court in a case involving Valerie and David Hoffman. Before Dick Blumenthal’s office fell on her like a ton of bricks, Valerie Hoffman, a small business woman, owned an herbal internet company, and her husband David was a house builder. A small independent contractor, David would buy land, put a house on it, sell the house and use the proceeds to repeat the process. Any monetary interruption in the business chain, he knew, would prove fatal to his livelihood. Valerie had been cited by the state’s Consumer Protection department on a few complaints, information that made its way to George Gombossy, recently installed at the Hartford Courant as the paper’s consumer protection bulldog. Because of the connections between the Courant and Dick Blumenthal, whose beam...