Donovan’s Pandora’s Box

Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan’s bid for the U.S. House is beginning to look like the inside of Pandora’s Box.

Those who have kept up with their Greek mythology will recognize Pandora as the first woman, created from water and earth by Hephaestus, the god of craftsmanship. At her creation, she was endowed with many godly gifts: Athena draped her in rich clothes; Aphrodite blessed her with beauty; Hermes bestowed on her the gift of speech. But there was a problem.

Prometheus, whose name means forethought, had rebelled against the gods on behalf of men, gifting them with fire and knowledge, for which effrontery he was punished by Zeus, who presented Pandora to Prometheus’brother, Epimetheus. Here, temptation entered the world. Given a beautiful box and warned never to open it, her godly gifts -- most especially curiosity -- induced her to open the box, at which point all the evils of the world flew out, spreading over the earth and contaminating the race of men.

FBI investigations of political corruption often involve the opening of political Pandora boxes.

Media curiosity – even saintly journalists are not free of human imperfections -- has now alighted on “a key member of Speaker of the House Chris Donovan’s legislative staff” who had refused “to cooperate with an internal investigation he [former U.S. Attorney Stan Twardy] launched into alleged campaign finance law violations in his [Mr. Donovan’s] 5th District Congress campaign,” according to one news report.

The Twardy investigation, which inferentially cleared Mr. Dovovan of corruption, was considerably hampered -- some would say rendered pointless -- by the refusal of principals under investigation by the FBI, all associates of Mr. Donovan, to participate in the investigator’s probe.

Among the refusenicks were Robert Braddock, Mr. Donovan’s fired finance director, and Donovan campaign manager Josh Nassi – both of whom were intimately involved with Mr. Donovan’s bid for the U.S. House in the 5^thDistrict.

Could Ms. Jordan, one columnist queried, have been “the conduit between the campaign and the powerful engine of doing favors for friends in the speaker’s office? She was, until recently, in a close personal relationship with fired Donovan campaign manager Joshua Nassi, who has been identified as one of three co-conspirators with Braddock

Ms. Jordan, herself a lawyer, has now lawyered-up. In investigations of this kind, lawyers interposed between possible political criminals and the media serve the same purpose as did mail vests in the age of chivalry. The arrows of outrageous fortune are sometimes prevented from striking a vital organ by lawyers who advise their clients to refrain from talking with, among others, Mr. Twardy. In the modern age, not patriotism but lawyers have become the last refuge of scoundrels.

In the meantime, the probe continues, as does Mr. Donovan’s limping campaign for the U.S. Congress.

A Grand Jury indictment, according to a report,“lays out an alleged conspiracy between Braddock, Raymond Soucy, a top corrections union official [who has now requested early retirement], three unidentified roll-your-own shop owners and two other campaign aides, identified by sources as Joshua Nassi and Sarah Waterfall, to provide money for the campaign in exchange for House Speaker Donovan killing the bill.”

The indictment,according to another report, fleshes out charges made in an earlier affidavit that secured the arrest of Mr. Braddock and brings Mr. Donovan close to the conspiracy to fraudulently disguise campaign contributions for the purpose of affecting legislation that would impact roll your own in Connecticut: “It shows that there was discussion among tobacco store owners and another individual identified as a conspirator of channeling tens of thousands of dollars to Donovan's campaign. One such discussion took place, according to the indictment, outside a Meriden restaurant in November just moments before two roll-your-own store owners were scheduled to meet with Donovan.”

If the Twardy report was an awkward attempt to review the Elizabethan age without mentioning the contributions of Queen Elizabeth or the plays of William Shakespeare, the Braddock indictment brings the principal actors associated with Donovan on stage in more explicit roles.

Here we see Mr. Soucy telling two roll your own unindicted co-conspirators prior to a meeting he had arranged with Mr. Donovan that neither should mention any bills because "the men in black running around . . . all the time . . . and we say, 'hey, we don't want you to do this bill,' . . . that's the same as me giving him a twenty, hundred dollar bill, 'let me go on the (expletive) two ounces you got me with'."

Following the Braddock indictment, Mr. Donovan’s new campaign manager – Tom Swan, executive director of the once non-partisan Connecticut Citizen Action Group, now a shill for Democratic Party mackerels shining in the moonlight – dispensed the usual palliatives, while Mr. Donovan’s campaign spokesman Gabe Rosenberg assured the media that “Nothing in this indictment is inconsistent with the findings of the independent Twardy report.”

Singing canaries are everywhere, and threats of prosecution likely have them sharing with the FBI information they have withheld from Mr. Twardy. Despite repeated calls for Mr. Donovan to drop his campaign for the U.S. Congress -- none issuing from Governor Dannel Malloy, a former prosecutor and the titular head of the Democratic Party -- Mr. Donovan is moving forward resolutely into the continuing crisis.

Three Notes On The Current Crisis

The unilateral changes in by-laws


It may be noted that what has been done unilaterally by the union leadership may be undone unilaterally by a different leadership.

Despite a desperate attempt by SEBAC negotiators Dan Livingston and Matt O’Connor to pin on such convenient scapegoats as the Yankee Institute  their dramatic failure to sell plan A to union rank and file members, some unions, dissatisfied with SEBAC representation, are now shopping around for other unions with which they might affiliate. In mid-June SEBAC leaders charged the Yankee Institute had improperly used the state’s e-mail system to communicate with union members and referred their dark suspicions to Attorney General George Jepsen, Connecticut’s version, under the state’s previous Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, of poet Francis Thompson’s “The Hound Of Heaven.”

SEBAC leaders, working in tandem with Plan A salesmen in the administration of Governor Dannel Malloy, unilaterally changed union by-laws to reduce to 50 percent the votes necessary to pass Plan A after it had been rejected under previous inconvenient by-laws.

This change, since it entailed a re-do of a previous vote rejecting Plan A, has not gone down well with many rank and file union members. The re-do vote under altered by-laws rankled the 43 percent of union members who initially voted against Plan A.

Passage of Plan A is virtually assured under the new by-laws unilaterally adopted by SEBAC leaders following the first unsuccessful vote. The re-do vote and by-laws change also have alienated the affections of some union members who initially voted affirmatively to adopt Plan A and regard the by-laws change as an undemocratic attempt to void a legitimate voting process without seeking to affirm the changes though a rank and file membership vote. If you can’t fix a vote, the next best thing is to fix the process that governs the vote. The unilateral change in by laws is viewed by many union members as an attempt to fix a vote by other means and, as such, it is likely to have lasting repercussions.

In the next three weeks, according to a story in the Hartford Courant, members of the 15 unions comprising SEBAC will be voting on re-drafted barely revised Plan A. But just as some pigs are more equal than other pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, so here some votes are more equal than others.

While the new tentative agreement will be presented to the full membership of some unions, some union leaders, Mr. O’Connor wrote on the union’s website, “are planning to have elected leadership cast their union’s vote because there are no negative changes in the revised TA as compared to the previous agreement.” In this tortured sentence, Mr. O’Connor appears to be saying that if a union voted to affirm Plan A, individual members of such unions will not, on a redo vote, be given the opportunity to change their vote from affirmative to negative.


The Closed Doors Of A Putative “Transparent” Administration

Candidate for Governor Dan Malloy promised voters a transparent administration. The budget process this year falls far short of transparency. In previous administrations, the budget shuttle cock was batted in public between two parties, one of which, the Republican Party, controlled the executive office first under Governor John Rowland and later under Governor Jodi Rell.

The political tension between Republican governors and the Democratic controlled General Assembly insured a certain degree of transparency. While it is true that Republican governors often stiffed Republican leaders in the General Assembly while making private deals behind closed doors with Democratic leaders, the party bifurcation nevertheless allowed budget negotiations between the two parties to be ventilated in Connecticut’s left of center media.

With the election of Dannel Malloy as governor, the crack in the door was permanently sealed shut. When reporters during the current budget negotiations asked their usual sources within Republican Party ranks what was going on behind the caucus closed doors, they replied, truthfully, that they knew no more than had been reported in the press. And the press knew nothing.

Negotiations between Malloy administration officials and SEBAC were just as impenetrable. Following Mr. Malloy’s elevation to the governor’s office, an iron curtain had been rung down on what the media in other administrations had denominated “the public’s business.” But this is how the one party state operates; closed doors give the current administration an insuperable propaganda advantage.

Union resistance to the autocratic rule of the union-administration-media-complex is but a crack in the concrete through which, given time enough, a blade of grass may sprout. The blade, one may be certain, will be reported to the attorney general’s office.

Malloy As Prometheus

Prometheus was the god in Greek mythology punished by Zeus for having brought the gift of enlightenment to men. Similarly, Mr. Malloy brought the gift of Plan A to state unions – breathes there a commentator who has not said, multiple times, that Plan A was a boon to unions? – and this gift was rejected, Mr. Malloy having been stretched on a rock outside the portals of heaven, his liver to be torn by the sharp beaks of eagles. Now he has been saved. Mankind’s tears have been turned to shouts of joy. Such is the narrative we can expect to see piped by successfully propagandized media adepts in the next few weeks – when, in fact, it is the state itself stretched on the rock waiting for a ravenous eagle to drink its wise blood.