Filling in the Gaps

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Of all the feedback that Albany County’s district attorney, David Soares, has gotten in response to his September 21 Troopergate report, the most telling assessment came from Governor Spitzer. “David Soares stands for probity, stands for thoroughness, stands for not flinching,” the governor reportedly said. The report issued by Mr. Soares could be called a lot of things, but “thorough” and “not flinching” are not the first words that come to mind.

The Soares report is essentially a collection of interview summaries followed by a conclusion that the governor’s office did not break any laws in its gathering of police records related to Senate Joseph Bruno’s use of state aircraft and security escorts.

The report makes almost no attempt to analyze the interviews with the governor and his aides, untangle their contradictions, or resolve crucial unanswered questions. Mr. Soares said his job wasn’t to examine inconsistencies. Certainly, voters who elected him expected something more than a regurgitation of interviews in the style of a high-school book report.

For Troopergate cognoscenti, the value of the Soares report is what was not asked and what was not told. In this case, the journalistic lodestar, “Follow the money,” becomes “Follow the gaps.”

The most important missing element concerns the question of whether the governor was involved in the debate within the executive chamber over how to best publicize the fact that Mr. Bruno was using state aircraft to travel to political events.

The Soares report allows the governor to say what he did and did not know and what he did and did not do. Mr. Spitzer says he “recalled a conversation” in May with his communications director, Darren Dopp, in which he was told about Mr. Bruno’s questionable use of state aircraft.

The governor said he told Mr. Dopp to drop the matter, calling it a “distraction. The “law was so porous,” Mr. Spitzer told Mr. Dopp, that Mr. Bruno probably didn’t do anything illegal, according to the report.

The governor told Mr. Soares’s office that he didn’t recall seeing a May 17 draft press statement prepared by Mr. Dopp that was to announce that the administration was examining Mr. Bruno’s use of aircraft. Mr. Spitzer, however,”surmised” that the release “may have been the basis for this conversation” with Mr. Dopp.

Mr. Spitzer said he “did not direct the gathering of any documents” nor did he direct the “release of any documents at any time to the media concerning Senator Bruno’s use of state transportation,” the report said.

What’s curious is that Mr. Soares allowed the governor’s comments to his office stand unquestioned. There is no evidence in the report that Mr. Soares sought to verify any of the governor’s claims by conducting follow-up interviews his top aide, Richard Baum, and Mr. Dopp, or by interviewing the governor’s counsel, David Nocenti, and policy director, Peter Pope, who also were aware of the proposed release.

In other words, Mr. Soares apparently never thought to ask the governor’s aides what role Mr. Spitzer played in the decision to bury the proposed release or whether the governor participated in discussions about what to do with the travel records after the executive chamber concluded that airing them in a press release was not the wisest move.

On May 23, Mr. Dopp e-mailed Mr. Baum informing him of existence travel records for Mr. Bruno’s prior trips to New York City from Albany. The e-mail concludes with the line: “Also, I think there is a new and different way to proceed re media. Will explain tomorrow.” Mr. Dopp told Mr. Soares’s office that the strategy he was talking about was referring the Bruno matter to the State Inspector General. Mr. Baum insists Mr. Dopp was referring to something else altogether.

In a July interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Baum said: “I think what he was referring to was right around then we were having these leaders meetings. I was frustrated at the coverage of it. You all covered it like it was, you know, guys throwing stones rather than a debate about issues, and we were talking about a way to clarify what’s at stake. He and I had sort of a — around the time of the meeting — had a running dialogue of how to make things clearer to you all. … I think that’s what he was referring to because that’s the only thing that I remember that would fit with that at that time.”

Mr. Baum apparently did not remember that just a week before Mr. Dopp e-mailed him, he and Mr. Nocenti agreed to abort the press release because they “didn’t believe there was sufficient evidence that Senator Bruno was violating any law.”

So to what was Mr. Dopp referring to when he said “different way”?

Here’s one working theory: The Spitzer administration, having concluded that Mr. Bruno had probably not broken the law, decided that rather than alert any investigative authority about Mr. Bruno’s use of state aircraft and take responsibility for its claims against the Senate leader, the smartest move was to accumulate the records from the police and hand off the hot potato to the Times Union.

“According to Dopp,” the Soares report states, “there was a series of conversations that took place within the Executive Chamber following the proposed press release.”

If the State Ethics Commission has an interest in getting to the bottom of this story, it would be wise to ask: Who took part in those conversations and what was decided?


The New York Sun

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