The super PAC supporting Republican Senate hopeful Themis Klarides in August 9th’s Connecticut primary must have some worrisome poll numbers that show rival Leora Levy with a late surge. Leadership Now is paying to broadcast a 30-second ad accusing Levy, a retired commodities trader, of making her fortune on high inflation.

It’s a nonsensical argument that suggests the PAC funders see Levy surging as the Greenwich Republican has tacked to the right. The first warning signs came with Klarides’s lackluster showing at the Republican nominating convention in May. The 22-year former state representative won the party’s endorsement but fell short of the 60% that she was expected to sail past.

Levy has been critical of Klarides’s support for gun control and access to abortion. The Republican National Committee member from Connecticut has performed some hasty shapeshifting, opposing women’s access to abortion services. She’s also held herself out as an opponent of regulating the availability of guns.

The commodities trading gambit is an attempt to tie Levy to the ills of inflation. It’s a risky argument for Klarides supporters. The Madison Republican is married to Eversource executive Greg Butler. The Republican operative has been a well-compensated force at the state’s dominant utility as costs have soared. Connecticut consumers pay the highest electricity rates in the continental United States.

The handful of contributors to Leadership Now must understand the importance of commodities in free market economies. One Leadership Now contributor who donated $50,000, may take a different view. William Tomasso went to jail for rigging the bidding process for state contractors during the administration of former governor John Rowland. Tomasso’s criminal conspiracy cost state taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

The ad includes a reference to Levy’s 1998 $100 contribution to Richard Blumenthal’s re-election campaign for attorney general. Levy has blamed the donation on her husband. If Levy defeats Klarides on Tuesday she will face Blumenthal in November.

Fairfield lawyer Peter Lumaj is the third primary contender.

Published August 3, 2022.

Peter Mariano was arrested in 2021 three times for driving under the influence of alcohol and twice for driving while his license was suspended. He was sentenced to four days in prison in May of this year. Shortly after Mariano, a Republican, was released from prison, Democrats in Beacon Falls, Middlebury, Naugatuck and Prospect nominated him as their candidate in November’s election.

Republicans nominated state Representative Rosa Rebimbas as their candidate. Mariano received enough votes to participate in an August 9th primary. If Mariano wins the primary, he will be unopposed in November.

Mariano was deemed incapacitated and unable to practice law in April 2021. That status remains unchanged. In January of this year, Mariano sought to have his license to practice law reinstated to active status. More than six months later, Mariano is still ineligible to practice law due to his incapacity. The court declined to seal the medical records Mariano submitted and they confirm his utterances to police officers arresting him at various times in 2021. He did not like going to rehab and suffered several relapses.

The most recent medical record Mariano has submitted to the action brought by the Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel is from December 2021. For a judge to be ineligible to practice law and be on probation with a further prison sentence hanging over him after having served a short term of incarceration is extraordinary in any state, but particularly Connecticut.

Video recordings of Mariano’s arrests while drunk and sober show the same alarming pattern: He tells the arresting officers he’s a judge and knows their bosses in the local police department.

The Code of Probate Judicial Conduct states in its first canon: A judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity and impartiality of the judiciary and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety. The test for appearance of impropriety is whether the conduct would create in reasonable minds a perception that the judge violated this Code or engaged in other conduct that reflects adversely on the judge’s honesty, impartiality, temperament or fitness to serve as a judge.

If this does not violate that essential canon of conduct, the Code has no meaning.

Published August 2, 2022.

Republican Senate hopeful Leora Levy unleashed a scathing attack on a Super PAC supporting rival Themis Klarides. The committee has received $50,000 from felonious construction executive William Tomasso. The maximum individual contribution to a Senate campaign is $2,900–and Tomasso has given those too.

Levy is wrong about almost everything in the competition to win the Republican Senate nomination on August 9th. The perpetually resentful Greenwich Republican is right that Klarides, an unimpressive fundraiser, is receiving crucial assistance from a felon who brought disgrace upon Connecticut.

Tomasso was at the center of the scandals that brought down former Republican governor John G. Rowland’s administration in 2004. Rowland went to prison–and so did Tomasso and Rowland’s top aides. Tomasso and his family provided illegal gifts to Rowland and others. The Tomasso family construction firm won scores of millions in state contracts while performing favors for Rowland, his co-chief of staff Peter Ellef. and others.

Tomasso earned an unusual place in the history of political corruption. One of his bribes was paid in gold coins. Eleef and his deputy were in an irrational twist about the consequences of the impending Y2K (remember that) start of the new millennium. They marked it with gold doubloons.

The bribery scheme included the state awarding a $57 million contract to Tomasso’s family business for the construction of a juvenile jail facility in Middletown. The project was a fiasco. Governor M. Jodi Rell closed it in 2005, the year she succeeded Rowland in office.

Tomasso’s legacy is with us in more than the millions wasted on the Middletown facility. Taxpayers now pay tens of millions of dollars to finance political campaigns. The stench of Tomasso and his conspirators provided an opening for proponents of sticking the public with the bill for their political campaigns to pass legislation the Rell, in an inexplicable about-face, went from opposing the misbegotten legislation to supporting it with no plausible explanation. The Rowland scandals were about state contracts and person graft, not campaign contributions. Satisfying Rowland’s obvious hankering for the big life he’d seen other enjoy was obvious to the bribe-payers. The classic home improvement bribes were accompanied by a charter flight to a national college basketball tournament and then on to Las Vegas.

Klarides was in the legislature when the grimy scandal unfurled week after week in the Hartford Courant. She certainly knows who William Tomasso. She could long ago have publicly denounced Tomasso’s participation in the Super PAC that is boosting her campaign as she seeks to hold off Levy.

William Tomasso has not only made a heft contribution to Super Pac to help Klarides. He’s made three $2,900 contributions directly to her campaign–one for the convention, another for the primary, and a third for the general election–should she make it that far. Three other Tomassos have made the same contributions.

Klarides could take a stand against corruption and a dark legacy that distorted Connecticut politics and contributed to the decline in confidence in our institutions. But she’d rather have the money.

Published July 29, 2022.

The State Election Enforcement Commission has voted to initiate an investigation into Brock Weber’s campaign for secretary of the state. The Republican operative submitted an application for a primary grant to finance his campaign at the beginning of June. The SEEC did not act on the application for more than $400,000 in public funds.

Weber abandoned his campaign two weeks ago with a terse statement that it would no longer be possible to carry on. On July 22nd, the committee announced Weber had withdrawn his application and terminated his candidacy. It voted to begin a rare investigation of for submitting fraudulent contributions in order to receive public funds.

You can see the commission acting in a brief video at the link below:

https://www.facebook.com/ctseec/videos/351479350505462

Updates as events require.

Published July 29, 2022.

Former Glastonbury Republican Chip Beckett is seeking the Independent Party nomination for lieutenant governor. The eight-term town council member announced Thursday that Rob Hotaling has asked Beckett to join him as his running mate. Hotaling is a member of the Independent Party and is seeking its nomination for governor.

Beckett served 16 years as a Republican member of the Glastonbury council. He left the party in 2021 and was defeated in a November bid for the council as a petitioning candidate. Becket has also run unsuccessfully for the state Senate and the state House of Representatives.

Published July 19, 2022.

The Hartford Cannabis Company is aggrieved. It is suing three state agencies. The company applied for a marijuana cultivation license under the social equity provisions of the 2021 legislation passed in a special session of the legislature. The first 16 provisional license holders were announced earlier this month. They will now undergo background checks. Hartford Cannabis was not among the approved applicants.

The social equity provisions are intended to address the disproportionate impact of illegal drugs on certain areas of the state. Hartford Cannabis claims it was unfairly denied a license because the Social Equity Council (SEC), which issued the licenses, denied the company’s application because it provided “no evidence that the [Social Equity Applicants] influence at least 65% of daily affairs” of the company.

Hartford Cannabis claims in its complaint against the Department of Consumer Protection, Department of Economic and Community Development, and SEC filed in Hartford Superior Court that the rules for completing and reviewing applications were changed after the period for submitting applications began. The rules, the plaintiff alleges, provided no opportunity for applicants to amend their applications after rules changes.

After two arrests for drunk driving in less than three weeks, Naugatuck Probate Judge Peter Mariano was caught driving on May 30, 2021, while his license was under suspension. Mariano admitted he should not be driving with his license under suspension. Mariano complained to long-suffering Naugatuck police officer Michael Gigliotti that he was recently turned away from a rehab facility because he was drunk.

In the back of a police cruiser–again–Mariano reminded Gigliotti that he knows the local chief of police and the deputy chief. Gigliotti concluded Mariano was sober–and the five-term Republican once more tried to use local connections to avoid the consequences of his crime.

In the link below, a family member arrived on the scene and explained to Gigliotti that they have been dealing with Mariano’s drinking for “years and years.” Only recently, the family member noted, was he arrested for the first time.

Mariano is the Democratic nominee for Judge of Probate and is the challenger in the August 9th Republican primary. If Mariano wins the Republican primary he will be unopposed for re-election in November in the probate district that includes Beacon Falls, Middlebury, Naugatuck and Prospect. Mariano spent only four days in jail for his four convictions.

Mariano remains on probation. It is the rare judge who is both on the bench and on probation at the same time.

Published July 26, 2022.

Wealthy Greenwich Republican Leora Levy inhabits a dark and dreary world. The Republican National Committee member makes the risible claim in her most recent ad that she is an outsider in the world of politics. The U.S. Senate hopeful tears some bark off party-endorsed rival Themis Klarides by accusing her of acknowledging systemic racism exists and supporting the use of mail-in ballots during the global pandemic.

Levy’s menacing voiceover artist’s script claims that mail-in ballots made it easier for Democrats to cheat. If the retired commodities trader is aware of cheating in Connecticut in the 2020 election, she failed to provide any evidence of voter fraud in Connecticut. In light of Donald Trump’s ongoing scheming to overturn the results of his 7 million vote loss to Joe Biden, why is Levy sure it’s only Democrats who cheat?

Levy, according to her most recent campaign finance report, has loaned $800,000 to her campaign. She has raised far less than that in individual contributions, despite years of fundraising for the establishment Republicans she now holds in contempt. Levy has earned one unusual claim in this bitter contest. She’s won more endorsements from U.S. senators than from Connecticut state senators.

The latest broadside from Levy repeats the accusation that Klarides is not “one of us.” How is it that Levy designates someone she has been with in the tiny world of Connecticut Republican politics is suddenly an alien, not “one of us”? The tactic can be seen as vulgar, the word Levy used to describe Trump in 2016. The transformation is complete. Levy is the refugee from tyranny who despises others yearning for the life she enjoys.

Published July 20, 2022.

Attorney General William Tong has settled the second part of claims arising out of Eversource’s marketing of gas services in South Windsor. The utility will pay $1.8 million to resolve the action, $1.6 million of the payment will go to Operation Fuel to provide assistance to low-income ratepayers.

I’m not usually part of a story I report. I wrote a column last year about Eversource marketing its natural gas services in the neighborhood where I live. The company repeatedly told residents through mailings and visits that if we did not connect to the newly installed gas lines in the street the town’s repaving program would preclude anyone from connecting for several years.

The town, Eversource said, was planning to repave the street soon. Once the repaving was completed, the town would prohibit cuts in the pavement to connect to gas even if one’s oil furnace failed. The town, however, has no plans to repave the street in the foreseeable future.

“Eversource misled homeowners to get them to switch to natural gas. These high-pressure tactics are unacceptable coming from any business, much less a regulated utility. Eversource has already paid a $1.8 million civil penalty imposed by the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA), and now they will pay an additional $1.8 million to settle these serious consumer protection allegations,” said Attorney General Tong in a statement Tuesday.

Eversource’s settlement with PURA included a $1.8 million payment to Operation Fuel.

Published July 19, 2022.

Republican Senate hopeful Peter Lumaj Tuesday morning urged rival Leora Levy to participate in a ceasefire while party-endorsed candidate Themis Klarides mourns the death of her mother and participates in the rituals that accompany it.

Lumaj and Levy are battling for the support of rightwing primary voters in their August 9th contest against Klarides. Levy, who was once a donor to Democrat Richard Blumenthal, has launched a series of attacks claiming Klarides is a “Democrat in disguise.”

The three candidates’ most recent campaign finance reports reveal each had only several hundred thousand dollars on hand for the final push to the primary. Levy has loaned $800,000 to her campaign and paid herself back $250,000.

Published July 19, 2022.