Browse > Home / News / Spitzer Pushed Staff’s Effort to Smear Bruno

Spitzer Pushed Staff’s Effort to Smear Bruno

March 24, 2008

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer was deeply involved in his administration’s efforts last year to discredit the State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, holding detailed discussions with senior aides, ordering damaging information about Mr. Bruno released, and calling an aide at home repeatedly to check on the progress, according to several people with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The governor has previously said he was not personally involved in the effort, suggesting only that he was vaguely aware that his aides had responded to a reporter’s inquiry about Mr. Bruno’s travels on state aircraft.

But testimony and other information gathered by the Albany County district attorney, P. David Soares, indicate that the governor’s participation was extensive and reflected Mr. Spitzer’s intense desire to damage Mr. Bruno, the people with knowledge of the case said.

The investigation was based on examination of e-mail messages, along with interviews with about a half-dozen senior administration officials, chief among them Mr. Spitzer’s former communications director, Darren Dopp, whom prosecutors decided last month to give immunity from prosecution.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Spitzer, who resigned March 12 after reports that he had patronized a high-priced prostitution ring, could not immediately comment on Sunday night.

Heather Orth, a spokeswoman for Mr. Soares, said: “As with all cases of public integrity, we will not comment on an ongoing investigation. We expect to be completed with our investigation at the end of the month, and will report our findings then.”

The effort to tarnish Mr. Bruno was the first major blunder of Mr. Spitzer’s first term. A report by the attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, on July 23 said that the Spitzer administration had improperly used the State Police to assemble records on Mr. Bruno’s flights. Mr. Spitzer apologized, placed Mr. Dopp on indefinite unpaid leave, and said he would not tolerate such behavior.

But according to the people with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is not over, Mr. Dopp described a meeting he had with Mr. Spitzer just before releasing the records assembled on Mr. Bruno to a reporter from The Times Union of Albany.

Around June 25 or June 26, Mr. Dopp told prosecutors, he first met with Richard Baum, the governor’s chief of staff, who told Mr. Dopp that the governor wanted the records on Mr. Bruno released to the media. “Eliot wants you to release the records,” Mr. Baum told him.

But Mr. Dopp, mindful of the political war that would erupt between the governor’s office and Mr. Bruno, hesitated and decided to check with the governor.

He told the governor that Mr. Bruno would be furious, according to people familiar with his account. Mr. Spitzer responded with expletives about Mr. Bruno and belligerently dismissed the warning.

The governor was so angry, Mr. Dopp recalled, that he turned red and spit out coffee he was sipping as he directed him to release the records immediately. “As he was saying it, he was spitting a little bit,” Mr. Dopp said. “He was spitting mad.”

The report by Mr. Soares is unlikely to settle the matter, known in Albany as “Troopergate,” which multiple investigative bodies are still reviewing. Mr. Soares himself released a report in September that exonerated Mr. Spitzer, but he reopened his inquiry in the fall after testimony Mr. Dopp gave seemed inconsistent with a statement he gave to Mr. Cuomo’s office, in which he accepted responsibility for the plan to damage Mr. Bruno.

Mr. Soares’s office has been pursuing the second investigation for several months. Though Mr. Soares interviewed Mr. Spitzer last fall, he did not interview him as part of the second investigation.

In Mr. Dopp’s account, he described a meeting during which he showed Mr. Spitzer the records he had assembled on Mr. Bruno’s travels, arraying them on a table in a conference room so Mr. Spitzer could inspect them. Another time, Mr. Dopp said, Mr. Spitzer dropped by Mr. Dopp’s office, picked up the records and looked at them briefly.

Mr. Dopp, and his wife, Sandy Dopp, who also met with investigators from Mr. Soares’s office, said that after the meeting in late June in which Mr. Spitzer angrily urged the release of the records on Mr. Bruno, Mr. Spitzer repeatedly called the Dopp home in the early morning hours checking on the status of the effort to get a story published in The Times Union, when it might be printed and how Mr. Dopp believed the story would turn out.

Ms. Dopp said she was struck by how often Mr. Spitzer called Mr. Dopp at home during that time.

Source: NY Times Read the full article here

Related Articles

Written by NY Politics · Filed Under News 

Comment on this article