Motor vehicles continue to dog Republican Amybeth Laroche’s campaign for the 28th State Senate District. Laroche’s third quarter campaign finance report includes a $1,551 charge from the candidate to the campaign for mileage.

This is unusual. Candidates rarely seek mileage reimbursement for themselves. Campaign workers, paid and volunteers, are sometimes reimbursed for mileage and lodging but mileage for a candidate is nearly unheard of, according to state election finance records.

During the reporting period, Laroche became entangled in a convoluted explanation of two late motor vehicle municipal tax bills. She claimed she had sent the payments to Newtown’s tax collector but they had been lost somewhere between the mailbox and the town hall.

Laroche is also the subject of a complaint for failing to disclose the cost of a mobile billboard making appearances around the four-town district that includes Easton, Fairfield, Newtown, and part of Bethel. The district is represented by six-term incumbent Republican Tony Hwang. Laroche made clear her intention to challenge Hwang before he announced he would not seek re-election this year. Laroche and Hwang have a distant relationship. Hwang has appeared in several smiling photos with Democrat Rob Blanchard, Hwang’s 2024 opponent and this year’s Democratic nominee. This has agitated Laroche, though she and Hwang continue to appear to stay well-clear of each other.

Laroche has portrayed herself as a fiscal conservative in campaign videos, though her brief tenure on Newtown’s finance board shows little evidence that she has transformed her rhetoric into action.

Laroche’s mileage reimbursement is the 11th highest expenditure in the period between July 1st and September 30th, during which Laroche’s campaign spent $79,000 in public funds.

Published October 6, 2026.

Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz found a way to grab video viewers’ attention in her 11th campaign for statewide office. The issue-averse Democrat has made an impression with a campaign ad that purports to feature her post-face renovation two days as she became eligible for Medicare.

Daily Ructions readers may have thought that Bysiewicz joining a Middletown delegation dominated by Josh Elliott supporters would be her biggest surprise of this gubernatorial election year. They did not anticipate Bysiewicz would reveal her admiration for Jocelyn Wildenstein in the final weeks of this campaign. Bysiewicz’s campaign committee has made a commitment to spend of hundreds of thousands of dollars on media to prompt Connecticut voters to ask an unusual question:

What did you do to your face?

Here’s that question put to music:

Published October 1, 2026.

Konstantinos Diamantis is at it again. The felonious fugitive fantasist has been promoting his nutty conspiracy claims from an undisclosed location in Greece since Friday. The disgraced former deputy state budget director has had no trouble finding journalists to give him a platform where challenges to the Diamantis mythmaking are absent.

Compare the Diamantis claims of victimhood to evidence at the 2025 criminal trial that ended with his conviction on all 21 counts of the government’s May 2024 indictment of him for bribery, extortion, and making false statements. The former Democratic state representative from Bristol once claimed that a school construction contractor who was slow in paying a bribe Diamantis believed he was owed, “has no clue who I am with my back to the wall.” We do know. The trial revealed it and so has his flight to Greece before his sentencing scheduled for September 17th in federal court in Bridgeport.

Diamantis claims he was not given an opportunity to make his case. He has, however, been floating various theories on the many imagined wrongs he has suffered for five years–since he lost his job as the deputy budget director. All of his travails, he repeats, arise from a vast conspiracy with Governor Ned Lamont at its center.

What Diamantis never acknowledges is that his bribery and extortion schemes began in 2018, before Lamont became governor. As the head of the state’s school construction finance program under the Malloy administration, Diamantis had been receiving illegal payments from the principals of Acranom Masonry for work they received on the construction of Hartford’s Weaver High School. When Hartford officials complained about the quality of Acranom’s work, Diamantis intervened, resolved a city payment to the company and made sure Acranom was included in another phase of the construction.

Diamantis made his bribery rates clear and, he believed, justified. “I’m very good at what I do and always do what I say. And I always work at 5% of total. Just FYI.” At his trial, Diamantis testified that these payments were consulting fees. He did not ask for an ethics agency opinion, execute a written consulting agreement, or declare those cash payments on his income tax returns. That’s what he testified to at his trial.

Why didn’t he take any of those legally required steps? That would be an appropriate question for a reporter to ask the fugitive felon who blames Lamont and a host of others for setting him up for prosecution. Diamantis testified that he would amend his income tax returns to reflect those cash payments. Has he?

Messages Diamantis sent from his state email account revealed him seeking more financial aid than had been offered by an elite private school where he hoped his daughter would be a student. Did he submit accurate financial statements to the school? That wasn’t all. Diamantis held an event at a Southington restaurant to raise money for tuition. He squeezed more money out of Acranom for that, too.

By 2021, Diamantis was making more than $190,000 as a high-ranking state employee–plus thousands in unreported bribes. When payments he was extorting from Acranom did not arrive in paper bags in the amount or on the schedule Diamantis demanded, he wrote that the masonry company’s owner, Salvatore Monarca, “has singlehandedly ruined my life and my daughter’s wedding because I trusted him.” Monarca relayed to John Duffy, his business associate and Diamantis’s ex-brother-in-law, “We paid him 35k.” It was never enough. Diamantis wanted an “annual fee,” Duffy told his boss.

Diamantis, Duffy reported to Monarca, demanded payments be made quickly. “He has to pay bills. All this BS every other day for two weeks.”

Diamantis claimed in a voicemail to Duffy that he had $318 in his bank account and demanded $40,000. In one message, the deputy budget director said he had to “cash in change” to pay for gasoline.

In early 2019, Diamantis continued his heavy-handed management of the construction of Birch Grove Primary School in Tolland. In 2018, the school was discovered to have been built with unstable concrete that had begun to crumble. Diamantis was overseeing the project as it took shape. Testimony at the trial revealed he sought payments from Monarca and Duffy a year before they would begin their work on the new school building without having had to bid on the job. In a 2019 text to Duffy regarding Birch Grove, Diamantis wrote, “50 is fair zero is an insult to my character for you I do 44 not a penny less and tomorrow as agreed other than that tell him I am out.”

An insult to his character? Diamantis, the evidence at trial and his public statements when Lamont fired him from his job, is perpetually aggrieved. He portrayed himself as a victim when his extortion scheme did not produce cash on his schedule or in amounts he demanded. The thin-skinned thug has not stopped. His widely publicized interviews ought to include questions on the crimes he committed. When he is not blaming Lamont, judges, and lawyers, he is casting aspersions at the jury. Diamantis, a lawyer by training, scoffs that the day and a half jurors deliberated was insufficient to give a proper review to the evidence. Another insult to his character.

Diamantis faces another bribery trial later this year id federal authorities can locate and extradite him, which legal experts say may be difficult and time-consuming. The text messages in that appear to be as damning as the ones in evidence at his trial last year. His co-defendants in the second trial have entered guilty pleas in that Medicaid-related scandal. Diamantis has yet to reveal how law enforcement conspired with others to weaponize their authority to make that $95,000 bribe he allegedly received from a Bristol optometrist to stop a state audit of her Medicaid payments.

In the second trial, Judge Stefan Underhill noted that Diamantis is in a relationship with a witness and should not discuss the case with that person. Who is that witness and what is the relationship? The school construction investigation and the Medicaid audit probe began several years apart. Does Diamantis maintain that his elusive tormentors were monitoring his illicit activities all that time and somehow managed to trick him into demanding, accepting, and never reporting more bribes?

These are not complicated questions. Anyone who has watched this sorry scandal unfurl over the past four years sought to be curious about the startling details. Diamantis’s calamitous testimony at his criminal trial did not convince jurors of anything other than his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His defense was so thing that his lawyer delayed the customary opening statement until after the prosecution rested its case in chief. At no time did Diamantis or his lawyer offer evidence or an argument that he had not made false statements to federal investigators.

When the bribe money was not flowing to Diamantis as he demanded, he wrote to Duffy–who along with two others pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to the corruption scheme in 2024–that Monarca “has no clue who I am with my back to the wall.” We do know who Diamantis is with his back against the wall. He is a criminal who will commit more crimes in the crunch. You would not know that by some of the softball, even sympathetic, interviews he has been offering to journalists.

September 23, 2026.

Former Governor Dannel P. Malloy will occupy the place of pride at Saturday’s annual state Democratic fundraising dinner when he pays tribute to his indispensable lieutenant governor, the late Nancy Wyman.

Wyman died last month in Tolland at the age of 80. She was a beloved figure who provided a striking contrast to the prickly, surly Malloy. His narrow victories in 2010 and 2014 can be attributed to affection for Wyman, who spent many days soothing party regulars and elected officials who endured gratuitous encounters with the full force of Malloy’s relentless disdain.

There may never have been a more striking contrast between a governor and a lieutenant governor than Malloy and the warmhearted Wyman.

A video tribute and displays of authentic emotion will accompany the outpouring of affection from the crowd of that rare prize in politics–genuine friends.

Published September 18, 2026.

State Comptroller Sean Scanlon announced Thursday he has suspended pension payments to Konstantinos Diamantis. The former state budget director failed to appear this morning at his sentencing on the federal corruption charges he was convicted of last year.

Scanlon said in a statement announcing he had stopped Diamantis’s direct deposit payments, “No one who has been convicted of defrauding the taxpayers and is now fleeing justice should continue receiving a pension.”

Diamantis’s lawyer, Norm Pattis, told the court he had a voice message from Diamantis Wednesday that informed him the convicted felon who is facing a December trial on other corruption charges, had fled to Greece and would not be returning to the United States.

Diamantis has been on track to receive more than $75,000 again this year (plus healthcare benefits) as a Tier-2 retiree. He has been receiving $6286.98 a month from the state.

The court learned Thursday morning that Diamantis drove to Florida, took a boat to the Bahamas, and flew to London. Diamantis is thought to have traveled on his Greek passport, which he had not turned over to the court as a condition of his release after his conviction.

Published September 17, 2026.

Troubles continue to mount for Newtown Republican Amybeth Laroche.

The State Elections Enforcement Commission is investigating Laroche’s use of a mobile video billboard that appears often on the streets of the 28th Senate District, but hardly at all in Laroche’s campaign finance reports. Those vehicles are the very model of a modern mobile billboard—and fetch a hefty daily—or even half day fee.

Laroche, who was disobliging about incumbent Senator Tony Hwang when she announced early in the year that she was running against the five-term Fairfield Republican whether or not Hwang sought a sixth term. When Hwang ran in a February special election for first selectman of Fairfield, the largest town in the 28th, by far, Laroche was seen not at all assisting him in his unsuccessful bid, though she now hails his wisdom in all things.

Campaigns do make difficult demands, real or imagined, on candidates. Laroche appears to have thought that paying preposterously lavish tribute to Hwang on the occasion of an annual Easton Republican dinner might put it all right. Laroche loaded paragraph after paragraph of saccharine praise featuring a suffocating digital embrace of Hwang with words she has likely never uttered before.

The Laroche post includes photos from the Easton event—-but none of the candidate with the man she now sees as an ideal public servant. Laroche was able to pose with the Easton resident who appeared in a Ryan Fazio ad purporting to feature Democrats who support the Greenwich Republican’s bid for governor. The popular poseur is Easton’s RTC chair and appears pleased to be seen with Laroche.

And what of deputy commissioner-in-waiting Hwang? He’s never been accused of photophobia in his two decades in the General Assembly. And Hwang continues to fear no lens. He found a moment Saturday to standstill for a still with Rob Blanchard, the Democratic nominee for the 28th. Hwang and Blanchard faced each other in 2024, but blessed are the peacemakers. The two are models of grinning cordiality in this fractious age.

”Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” John F. Kennedy confided to an aide he told he would be supporting a Republican for statewide office against a Democrat JFK deemed unacceptable.

Hwang and Blanchard have appeared in nearly as many photos this campaign as Senator and Mrs. Jason Perillo. The Shelton Republican, who has served in the legislature for more than 20 years, calls the campaign “a family affair.” Perillo said in one video he and Becky Perillo “are always trying to identify new issues….” He invites comments. Perillo is known to keep a close eye on his mailbox.

As Mrs. Wendell Willkie said, in a phrase for the ages, when she returned to living with her wayward husband and 1940 Republican presidential nominee, “Politics make strange bedfellows.”

An uneasy truce between the two parties held that year. Democrats decided to remain silent about Willkie’s open affair with influential New York Herald Tribune book editor Irita Van Doren because they knew Republicans possessed nutty letters from FDR running-mate Henry Wallace to a Russian mystic. That was how gentlemen and ladies handle such things as France fell to the Nazis, the Battle of Britain began, and the Soviet Union remained in a murderous alliance with Hitler. On the eve of that year’s Republican nominating convention, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed two prominent Republicans, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, to his cabinet to show that in a perilous hour, party loyalty must find a new place—much like Hwang and Blanchard are doing on a smaller scale in four towns.

Published September 13, 2026.

Without a search or a job posting, the Regional Water Authority (RWA) and Aquarion Water Authority (AWA) agreed to pay North Haven First Selectman Michael Freda $500,000 a year for four years as his base salary, according to a July 23rd confidential Offer of Employment. Freda will also receive an $8,000 a year automobile allowance.

The “Dear Michael” letter with details of the generous compensation offer was obtained Monday in response to a request for documents made last week. Freda declined last week to respond to questions about his new job.

The deal calls for Freda to begin a transition period on September 1st. He will work 20 hours a week and be compensated a proportional amount of his half-million dollar salary. Freda has said he will remain first selectman until December 31st. That arrangement means Freda will be both CEO of RWA and the chief elected official of a member town and customer of the 15-town water system.

Freda will serve as CEO of the two unregulated water companies that serve more than one million Connecticut residents. The AWA was authorized by the legislature in a 2024 special session. It encompasses 60 municipalities. It purchased Eversource’s Aquarion for $2.4 billion. It paid Eversource with a successful bond offering this summer.

The employment offer states, “The Authority believes your experience, leadership and commitment to public service make you exceptionally qualified to guide the organization during this important period of transition.” Note the carefully crafted letter does not say Freda will be leading the Authority. He will report to the RWA.

Officials in the AWA’s 60 towns may soon realize what their failure to pay attention means for ratepayers.

Freda signed the letter on July 24th.

Published August 24, 2026

Calling hours for former Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman are on Sunday, August 16, 2026, from 3-6 p.m., at The Lodge Community Chapel, 130 Deerfield Rd., Windsor.

Published August 13, 2026.

Nancy Wyman, a favorite of Connecticut Democrats for decades, died Wednesday morning, The Tolland Democrat served as state representative, state comptroller and lieutenant governor in an unbroken 28-year string of election victories.

Her vibrant presence lifted large and small gatherings for decades. She embodied the joy of politics and knew how to move the levers of government, often without raising alarm or leaving fingerprints. Nancy Wyman, formed productive alliances and bonds with members of both parties. Her high heels became a symbol of her brand, getting things done her legacy.

Details as they become available.

Published August 12, 2026.

‘Representative John Larson continues to struggle with the 21st century content creation. On Saturday his re-election campaign needed three tries to describe accurately deceptively edited comments by Governor Ned Lamont about Larson at an event sponsored by Manchester Democrats.

The City of Village Charm Democrats insisted on including Larson in the primary rally intended to boost the two-term governor. Lamont, with Larson standing nearby, acknowledged the East Hartford Democrat’s long tenure, 28 years, in the House and noted he shows up for work every day, though politely omitted the number of days the House is in session. Larson and his campaign took the courteous Lamont’s words and twisted them into what looked like an endorsement—-where there has been none.

The Lamont campaign became aware of the deceptive editing of their candidate’s comments and sought corrections. Over an hour, a Larson social media post began with a claim that Lamont joined forces with the 78 year old challenger to party-endorsed candidate Luke Bronin to a claim that Lamont supports Larson. Finally, Larson conjured a third post thanking Larson for his kind words. In each post, Larson criticized the role of the rich in politics, a head-scratching note to hit when associating himself with the Greenwich self-funding his fifth statewide campaign.

Larson has made disdain for billionaires a theme of his disjointed campaign while receiving assistance from billionaire George Soros.

Manchester was an appropriate spot for a convoluted late nomination campaign event. Larson made a distasteful deal to deliver the town’s 30 pliable delegates to Jillian Gilchrest, a West Hartford Democrat, at the end of the May nominating convention’s first ballot, to qualify the state representative for the primary ballot in exchange for her support on the second ballot. In exchange, Gilchrest was to deliver enough of her 27 delegates to Larson. She failed and a majority of her delegates supported Bronin and left Gilchrest’s claims as the candidate of rectitude in tatters.

The Manchester Democrats pride themselves on supporting party-endorsed candidates and discouraging challenges. Their support for Larson will make it difficult to extinguish the democratic instincts of some of its members in the future.

Early voting ends today. The primary campaign concludes Tuesday.

Published August 9th.