Blumenthal’s Two Hats, Two Heads And Two Faces

Republican Party Chairman Chris Healy, clearly a partisan, has called upon Attorney General and Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Richard Blumenthal to surrender his position as attorney general, the sooner the better.

Healy makes the following points in a press release:

1) “It is clear that Dick Blumenthal wants the taxpayers to subsidize his campaign strategy, thereby hiding from reporters and voters with legitimate questions on his policy positions and record, while issuing press releases from his AG’s office to sue entities that suit politically. If you notice, many of these suits provide him with national and state media exposure.”

2) The attorney general’s office has become something of a shield, protecting the prospective U.S. Senator from exposure to media scrutiny: “A series of missteps, evasions of his record and bad publicity has caused Blumenthal to hunker down in his office, rarely appearing before microphones after nearly 20 years of being a ubiquitous media machine. Dick Blumenthal is now in a taxpayer financed secure location. If he wants to be the U.S. Senator for Connecticut, he should step out in the light and make his case, not pretend that his work is so important that the professional staff at his office couldn’t cover for him.”

3) The attorney general’s office has become highly politicized under the last two occupants of that office, first current U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman and, following him, prospective U.S. Senator Blumenthal. Therefore, Healy says, “It is fair to suggest that every time the Attorney General’s media machine kicks in from its perch, one should ask whether it’s for the betterment of Connecticut or Dick Blumenthal’s Senate campaign. Dick Blumenthal should leave no doubt about this conflict and either step down or respond to questions from voters – who pay his salary – and his opponents.”

The attorney general – or is it the prospective U.S. senator? -- recently came under fire from Connecticut’s Media on a few counts: He had lied several times concerning his service during the Vietnam war. That issue, driven by an out of state media, has been fairly ventilated. But the lashes Blumenthal had received by the national press had forced the attorney general – or is it the prospective U.S. senator? -- to take refuge from the slings and arrows hurled at him by absenting himself from media opportunities.

Once ubiquitous, writes award winning journalist Ken Dixon, Blumenthal has now disappeared into a hidey-hole: “Such is the new Dick Blumenthal. Formerly laughably ubiquitous and always available for a quote, he is now in the bunker officially. Having just called his attorney general office, where he supposedly works for the people paying his six-figure salary, the Blogster was told to await a news release. Beautiful. Such high stakes, such official reticence. Who’s the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate? Some write-in candidate named Jeff Russell. Maybe he’d like to comment on the US Supreme Court decision today on the Chicago hand gun ban. Of course, it was Blumenthal, not Russell, who successfully argued the ban in state court and in the state Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the ban nearly 15 years ago.”

Now, the obvious question to put to prospective U.S. Senator Blumenthal is whether he would, as a U.S. senator, support the Chicago gun ban. The problem is that the head that answers the question sits on the shoulders of Attorney General Blumenthal, and it may not be convenient for the attorney general to answer the question. To what extent will assertions made by prospective U.S. Senator Blumenthal screw up, so to speak, his status as attorney general?

When former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez was about to be brought into court on charges to which were attached a 50 year prison sentence, Attorney General Blumenthal was cordially invited to repudiate his old friend and political stalwart. He declined, grievously disappointing Courant columnist, blogger and Connecticut Public Broadcasting Newtwork talk show host Colin McEnroe, who wrote: “I think it's fair to ask Richard Blumenthal, who has announced his intention to use the fairly new pension and benefits law against Perez, why he saw fit to endorse Perez in 2007 when the basic facts of the renovations case against Perez were a matter of record? These facts haven't changed much at all from then until yesterday, when they were good enough to make six people return guilty verdicts. Why weren't they good enough to make Blumenthal withhold his endorsement?”

After Perez’s conviction, Blumenthal eagerly and quickly pointed out it was he who pressed upon the legislature the statute that now allows him to revoke Perez’s pension. Hours after the conviction, Attorney General Blumenthal was writing to Chief Stare’s Attorney Kevin Kane, “I intend, at the earliest possible time and in consultation with your office, to seek an order revoking his pension.”

The obvious question to put to prospective U.S. senator Blumenthal is this: As U.S. senator, would the present attorney general, who has vowed to give up his position after the general election in November, press his fellow senators in the U.S. congress to pass a similar federal law? The journalist who put that question to Attorney General Blumenthal is still awaiting an answer from prospective U.S. senator Blumenthal.

It has become very difficult to get honest answers from the elusive Blumenthal lately.

Is Blumenthal hiding from Connecticut’s media? You betcha. Are the two highly politicized positions he is juggling incompatible? You betcha.

Should Blumenthal resign his attorney general position while running for the U.S, senate?

Blumenthal Moves To Revoke Perez’s Pension

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has written to Kevin Kane to advise him that Connecticut’s “Pension Revocation Statute” requires him to notify the Chief State’s Attorney of the “possibility that any fine, restitution or any other monetary order of the criminal court” may be paid from the pension of Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez.

Blumenthal, according to the attorney general’s press spokesman, both proposed and pressed the legislature to adopt the statute under which pensions could be revoked.

“Mr. Perez’s conviction,” Blumenthal noted in his letter dated June 29,2010, “ reflects significant violations of public trust and misuse of office. Accordingly, I intend, at the earliest possible time and in consultation with your office, to seek an order revoking his pension.”

Mayor Perez resigned from office after he had been found guilty, according to a Hartford Courant report of “receiving a bribe, fabricating evidence, accessory to the fabrication of evidence, conspiracy to fabricate evidence, conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny by extortion and criminal attempt to commit first-degree larceny by extortion in the trial that began May 12. The only charge Perez was not convicted of is fabricating evidence.”

The mayor, who could receive a maxim sentence of up to 50 years, intends to appeal. He is due to be sentenced on Sept 10.

Eddie, Dick And The Etiquette Of Misspeak

On June 27, 2007, Inspector Michael Sullivan received a report that Mayor Eddie Perez had some work done in his house by a contractor appointed to do a major job for the city of Hartford. The information supplied to him tickled his worry wart, and Sullivan arranged a meeting with Perez the following day.

A record of the meeting was made. Sullivan asked Perez whether people who were doing work for the city also had done work on his house.

Perez answered yes.

Did the mayor pay for the work, and did he receive a cost reduction?

Perez said he paid the market price for the housework done by Carlos Costa in the amount of $20,000 a year and a half earlier. There was no contract involved; the work was done by verbal agreement. Sullivan asked for a copy of Perez’s cancelled check. Perez said he would be happy to furnish a copy of the check. There was no check. Payment on the work – minus a 50% discount, according to the contractor -- was made a year and a half after the work had been completed.

After this stressful meeting, Perez suddenly felt the need of a lawyer and betook himself to Huber Santos, who requested and was permitted a meeting with Perez’s prosecutor, Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane.

Santos corrected the record, telling Kane that the mayor had earlier “misspoke.” In fact, he had not paid the bill. However, an invoice existed, and the mayor would be paying the bill shortly. According to Santos, he told Kane that Perez “misspoke” because John Rose, the city’s lawyer, was present at the meeting and Rose was unaware of the home renovation work.

Following the second day of the Perez corruption trial, a Hartford paper summarized these events under a blaring first page caption -- “PEREZ OFFERS REASON HE LIED.” It was a pull no punches title, forthright and unsubtle, that quickly brushed aside any notion of misspeaking.

Below three paragraphs of the front page story, the paper printed a useful index of single line teasers under the title – “CAUGHT ON TAPE.”

Hope springing eternal, one may hope in the near future to read in a Connecticut paper some such caption as this – “BLUMENTHAL OFFERS REASON HE LIED.

Before Blumenthal had been chosen by acclamation at the Democratic Party’s nominating convention for U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s seat, the attorney general had been exposed to an unremitting barrage of criticism from all quarters by people, not all of then reliable Democrats, who did not hesitate to use the “L” word in connection with Blumenthal’s serpentine evasions concerning his non-service in Vietnam.

The joke most often told by Blumenthal’s Republican opponents following a press conference in the course of which Blumenthal claimed to have misspoken was that Hanoi Jane Fonda had spent more time in Vietnam than the attorney general, now the choice of his party as U.S. Senator.

At the convention, his harshest Democratic critic, Merrick Alpert, was rolled over by reality and endorsed Blumenthal’s nomination as inevitable, after which he disappeared into the political woodwork. But before the convention, the “L” word was almost as ubiquitous in print as the attorney general himself, possibly the most often quoted Connecticut politician in the last twenty years.

The forbidding Chris Mathews, host of “Hardball” and certainly not a reflexive Republican kept pet, called Blumenthal a liar several times in two separate broadcasts. Democratic operative Paul Begala nuzzled up to the word in one interview and was dismayed by the attorney general’s inability to offer an honest apology to Vietnam vets Blumenthal dishonored by flitching their glory. Having attacked the initial New York Times story probing Blumenthal’s misspeakings, Colin McEnroe, a leftist columnist for the Hartford Courant and the host of his own program on Connecticut Public Broadcasting appeared, in a subsequent posting on his blog site “To Wit,” to slip-slide away from the possibility that Blumenthal was not lying about his non-service in Vietnam; this after the Hearst newspapers in Connecticut, scouring their archives, produced other fatal Blumenthal quotes falsely proclaiming that he had served in Vietnam.

Blumenthal has not fully and frankly apologized for his LIES. His method when faced with searing public criticism, both as attorney general and now as the nominee of his party of the U.S. Congress, has been to hunker down and wait for the war to pass over his placid head, barely denting his halo.

After Blumenthal’s coronation, his supporters were regaled by theTom Petty song “I won’t back down:”

“Well, I won’t back down. No, I won’t back down
You could stand me up at the Gates of Hell
And I won’t back down.”

The convention itself seemed to be unaware that the song, in the Johnny Cash version below, is a tribute to men who have seen action in battle, an unexpectedly ironic commentary on Blumenthal’s several LIES.



With the indispensable righteous wind of Connecticut politics at his back, an adulatory media, Blumenthal may not have to worry overmuch about the kind of headlines bearing the “L” word that are rasping Perez, who will quietly – very quietly, one may be sure – support Blumenthal’s candidacy. Ned Lamont, who wants to govern both the state and its national guard, is already on board.