Rowland The Tar Baby

Henry David Thoreau used to say that most ways of making money lead downward. The way downward will be swift for John Rowland, former governor of Connecticut and, very likely, former radio talk show host.

Lisa Wilson Foley and her husband Brian Foley pleaded guilty Monday in U.S. District Court to having paid Mr. Rowland for “secret political assistance” by means of a sham contract, a violation of campaign finance law.

Brian Foley fessed up after federal authorities threatened to prosecute his wife. The Foleys admitted culpability in court. Lisa Wilson-Foley said, "I did not report money that my husband paid to John Rowland while he was working on my campaign," and her husband said, “I knowingly and intentionally conspired with co-conspirator one, who was John Rowland." Prosecutors negotiated with the Foleys a plea agreement under the terms of which the Foleys pled guilty to misdemeanor charges that carry a maximum penalty of a year in prison.

Having secured the co-operation of the Foleys, prosecutors will now turn their attention towards Mr. Rowland, who really ought to have read The Prince of Providence, a book that details the life and times of former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, who was, like Mr. Rowland,  also a radio talk show host following his release from prison on corruption charges. Mr. Cianci, who carried with him into his radio talk show most of his vices and few of his virtues, was twice jailed, twice won the mayoralty of Providence, and twice sought refuge in radio talk show land.

It was Mr. Rowland, Connecticut’s political tar baby, who first approached the Foleys with a proposition. He would help Lisa Wilson Foley win her contest for a U.S. House seat in the 5^th Congressional District. There was, however, a proviso: Any assistance from radio talk show host Rowland must be masked – and renumerated. It was the renumeration, not the assistance, that caught Mr. Rowland’s foot in the prosecutorial snare.

Connecticut’s political commentators have sometimes passed from political commentating to politics without much unfavorable notice. Charlie Morse, perhaps the longest serving political commentator at the Hartford Courant, joined the Lowell Weicker gubernatorial campaign after having written scores of columns favorable to Mr. Weicker, but Mr. Morse never accepted payment from Mr. Weicker for having written the columns. That’s a journalistic no-no. However, he did continue writing about Mr. Weicker for the Courant after having accepted a job in the Weicker administration, which is also a no-no and amounts to journalistic renumeration.

These speed bumps were no bar to Mr. Rowland, who had in the past spent some time in prison after having pled guilty to a charge of “depriving the public of honest service” when he was governor of Connecticut.

Following Mr. Rowland’s conviction, which itself followed an aborted impeachment, Hugh Keefe, who had defended many politicians caught in the coils of corruption, noted that Mr. Rowland had compromised his reputation for nickels and dimes: “…when you look closely at what he did, it was nickels and dimes. And I've known a lot of politicians, who I can talk about now because they're dead, and what was going on in the Rowland administration is really not out of line with what I know was going on in the '50s, '60s and ‘70s.”

According to prosecutors, the Lisa-Wilson Foley caper netted Mr. Rowland $35,000 – nickels and dimes.

And the tar baby soiled everyone he touched.  Former Connecticut Party Chairman Chris Healy was a senior advisor to the Lisa-Wilson Foley campaign. Mr. Healy, “Political Advisor 1” in prosecution documents, authored a public statement in 2012 “denying Rowland was being paid by the Wilson-Foley campaign and saying Rowland had a paid business relationship with Foley's nursing home chain,” according to Hartford Courant story.

Queried by a courant reporter on his false statement, Mr. Healy “said that his statement only repeated what the Foleys and Rowland told him, and that he didn't know it was false. In light of Monday's guilty pleas, he said, the Foleys ‘did not tell me the truth, obviously,’ and ‘I guess’ Rowland didn't either.”

Mr. Rowland may have lied to his employer as well. Early last month, retired news director for WFSB-TV3 in Hartford Dick Ahles wrote in an op-ed piece in the Journal Inquirer, “Rowland works for a respected news organization, one of the few left on the radio. If a newspaper columnist, paid to express his opinion on politics and politicians, was employed by a candidate or her husband or even working voluntarily for a candidate without telling his readers, he’d be fired or at least have his column taken away until the matter was settled.

The matter of the Big Lie, according to the emails provided in prosecution documents, has been settled, and the spreading tar ought to be contained.

Occhiogrosso, Moving On Up, Or Down?

 

Roy Occhiogrosso, the Vice President for Global Strategy who has shuttled back and forth between Governor Dannel Malloy’s administration and his duties at Global Strategy, has now become, according to a short piece in CTMirror, “a consultant to the Connecticut Democratic Party.” Apparently, no one in Connecticut’s media knows whether Mr. Occhiogrosso’s new Position Of Influence (POI) within the Democratic Party’s lucrative off shore political operation is a lateral or a vertical move.

Is this a political promotion, or is Mr. Occhiogrosso simply biding his time until his former boss, Mr. Malloy, decides to enter the lists for governor? Mr. Malloy has said he would make an announcement concerning his re-election as governor sometime in the merry month of May, months after Republican gubernatorial contenders have bloodied themselves in pre-general election cat fights.

How much is Mr. Occhiogrosso and/or Global Strategy getting paid for the new consultancy? And, more importantly, what specific service has Mr. Occhiogrosso, once called Mr. Malloy’s “uber-flack” by CTMirror, performed for Connecticut’s Democratic Party? Even more importantly, has Mr. Occhiogrosso declared on his tax forms all emoluments he may have received from the party for which he may or may not have performed a service?

The Feds, as Mr. Occhiogrosso must know, are back in Connecticut. They are, according to a blog written by Kevin Rennie for the Hartford Courant, gathering data in a Grand Jury that could be used by prosecutors to cut short former Governor John Rowland’s career as a radio talk show host.

A conviction may turn on the question: Did Mr. Rowland in fact perform a service for Brian Foley, the owner of a number of nursing homes, for which Mr. Foley paid Mr. Rowland $30,000? The operative prosecutorial assumption is that Mr. Rowland had received a payment from Mr. Foley in exchange for a political favor extended to Mr. Foley’s wife, Lisa Wilson Foley, who had been running as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut’s 5^th District. Neither Mrs. Foley nor Mr. Rowland were politicians at the time of the possible political pay-off.

Nor is it certain that there was a political pay-off.  It has been said that Mr. Rowland had been critical of former State Senator Andrew Roraback on his program at a time when Lisa-Wilson Foley and other Republican contestants were involved in a struggle to obtain the Republican Party nomination for the 5^th District U.S. Senate seat. The nomination fell to Mr. Roraback, who thereafter lost the contest in a general election to Democratic Party nominee Elizabeth Esty. Ms. Esty prevailed over union favored Democratic candidate Chris Donovan following a federal investigation into campaign financing irregularities that had forced Mr. Donovan to vacate the field. After his loss to Ms. Esty, Mr. Roraback was appointed by Mr. Malloy to Connecticut’s Superior Court.

It cannot be said that Mr. Rowland’s criticism of Mr. Roraback resulted in any political harm to Mr. Roraback, who emerged as the nominee of his party.  Neither did Ms. Foley receive an effective political benefit from radio talk show host Rowland, and most grown-ups understand that conservative radio talk show hosts tend to prefer the less leftward leaning candidate in any Republican Party contest.

Some people regard Mr. Rowland as providing balance to Connecticut’s left of center media hegemon, which tends to support the most leftward leaning candidate in primaries and general elections. The Hartford Courant, for instance, supported Ms. Esty over Mr. Roraback in the general election, even though Mr. Roraback easily passed the paper’s several litmus tests: The Republican candidate was a social liberal and a fiscal conservative; he had far more practical experience in government than Ms. Esty, and he was just the sort of moderate Republican, occasionally favored by the Courant, who might have provided a necessary balance in Connecticut’s all progressive Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation.

As a practical matter, the Courant’s endorsement of Esty was more fatal to Mr. Roraback than was Mr. Rowland’s “attack” on Mr. Roraback before the Republican nominating convention had chosen him as its designated candidate for the 5^th District.

None of these quibbles would prevent a Grand Jury – essentially a prosecutorial Star Chamber operation – from returning an indictment against Mr. Rowland. A Grand Jury properly primed by an aggressive prosecutor is fully capable of indicting a watermelon on a charge of jaywalking. But the case against Mr. Rowland appears weak, if only because neither he nor Ms. Foley were active politicians in a position to dispense political favors and, bearing in mind Mr. Rowland’s public persona as a “conservative” talk show host, his negative endorsement of Mr. Roraback is not in the least surprising. How is a talk show “attack” on Mr. Roraback substantially different than an editorial attack on a candidate for office whose opponent is favored by the editorial board of a newspaper?

The notion that a radio talk show host would embrace a candidate for office, accept money from the husband of the candidate for a service that either was or was not performed, and then attack the favored candidate’s opponent is a shabby proposition. Some journalists would rightly and indignantly reject such an arrangement; so would honorable politicians. But jail time for a radio talk show host who pumps up an ideologically like-minded political wannabe – maybe not.

The failure to pay taxes for services rendered, on the other hand, is a whole different kettle of fish. Mr. Rowland’s tax payments had better be in order. And while prosecutors are on the hunt in Connecticut, Mr. Occhiogrosso’s tax representations also had better be able to pass the Mackerel in moonlight sniff test.

One can never be too careful.