What Did Spitzer Do?
As the governorship of Eliot Spitzer enters the rehabilitation phase — "lessons learned" is the new happy mantra in Albany — a ghost from his past threatens to spoil the storyline.
It's that of Darren Dopp, who worked under Mr. Spitzer for almost a decade as his communications director until his respected career in government went down in flames, a casualty of the scandal known as Troopergate.
After the controversy erupted in July, Mr. Spitzer suspended Mr. Dopp, accusing him of vague improprieties and lapses of judgment. He was never able to get back his job but resigned under a cloud of ignominy and took a job at a lobbying firm.
For the Spitzer administration, Mr. Dopp, who is under suspicion of perjury, now functions primarily as a scapegoat. Officials characterize him as a "rogue" who led a misguided and unauthorized mission to expose Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno's use of state helicopters to attend political fund-raising events.
New details that are gradually emerging paint a different story, one that appears to contradict assertions made by the governor to investigators.
They don't answer the question of whether Mr. Spitzer or his aides were aware of the special measures undertaken by state police to gather and recreate records of Mr. Bruno's trips to New York City or were under the impression that police had followed standard operating procedures. The distinction goes to the heart of whether a "dirty trick" was committed.
The details do, however, challenge the notion that Mr. Dopp was a lone "gunman" and that Mr. Spitzer's involvement in the effort was limited to discouraging Mr. Dopp from going public with the travel records.
According to the report by the Albany County district attorney, David Soares, Mr. Spitzer told investigators that he did not recall taking part in any discussion about referring the travel records to the Inspector General's office prior to July 1, the day the Times Union published its story about Mr. Bruno's trips.
The governor also said he "did not direct the release of any documents at any time to the media concerning Senator Bruno's use of state transportation," the report stated.
The governor's discussions with Mr. Soares's office were not under oath. A question to consider is whether Mr. Spitzer would provide the same answers under oath before the Commission on Public Integrity, whose ethics investigation is progressing at a glacial pace.
Within the Spitzer administration, recollections have varied. According to a source close to the governor, Mr. Spitzer before July 1 participated in a discussion about alerting the Inspector General's office.
The source said Mr. Spitzer in late June was shown all of the travel records concerning Mr. Bruno that were retrieved from the state police — including the itineraries that were "recreated" — and signed off on their release to the Times Union.
Mr. Spitzer, along with other senior aides, concluded that the records supplied by the police ought to be treated as public documents, the source said.
The governor's office has a different memory of what happened. Mr. Spitzer "did not direct the release of documents but knew Darren was responding to a" Freedom of Information Law request, a spokeswoman for the governor, Christine Anderson, told me by e-mail.
Mr. Spitzer was an active participant in the internal debate over what to do with Mr. Bruno's itineraries — a discussion that began weeks before the Times Union submitted a FOIL request.
When the time came to make the call on releasing the documents to the press, was Mr. Spitzer out of sight? We'll find out for sure if and when Mr. Spitzer testifies.
You could argue that given that the effort to nail Mr. Bruno on abusing governmental aircraft privileges was an unmitigated communications disaster for the administration, it's not unreasonable to hold accountable the director of communications.
It's an argument I suspect many inside the administration have settled on to justify the expungement of Mr. Dopp.
Following the same logic, I suppose you would expect more heads to roll as a consequence of Mr. Spitzer's doomed plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, a policy fiasco that arguably caused more damage to the administration than the state police controversy, which at least didn't explode in the face of the leading Democratic presidential contender.
Both were cases of politics interfering with sound judgment. In the first instance, an impatient Spitzer administration yearned for a shortcut to toppling Mr. Bruno and the Senate Republicans.
In the second, according to a source close to the governor, Spitzer administration officials had assumed the license plan would help them ward off a Democratic primary challenge by Attorney General Cuomo by locking up the Hispanic community vote. What's funny is that the same people who convinced Mr. Spitzer that the answer to his Cuomo problem was illegal immigrant licenses are still safely ensconced in the second floor of the Capitol Building. Mr. Spitzer, meanwhile, must be pondering the irony that the only person he was able to steamroll was one of his own men.
jacob@nysun.com
