The Shadow Knows. Roberti Hammers Donovan on FBI Investigation of Campaign. Swan Wants $3 for Attack.

Give Democratic Fifth Congressional District challenger Don Roberti full marks for pointing out what everyone knows but partisans refuse to say. “There’s a shadow hanging over Chris Donovan.” That’s the front of a Roberti hit piece on Donovan that has the Speaker of the House’s campaign in a twist.

The mailer highlights what even Donovan acknowledged with his hiring of Republican former United States Attorney Stanley Twardy to provide cover for the crime-ravaged finance operation of the campaign. The FBI has the goods on Donovan’s campaign—and they’ve got it on tape. Roberti reminds primary voters what Donovan would them to forget: His campaign is engulfed in an active, vigorous federal criminal investigation that has entangled his campaign staff and public employees who work for him in the state legislature. It is a mess.

The Donovan campaign is not happy with Roberti speaking truth to power, as that sort likes to say. Campaign manager Tom Swan, who replaced alleged co-conspirator Joshua Nassi, has never seen anything like the Roberti attack. Swan, in a Saturday email to his marks, fumed, it is “one of the most despicable attack mail pieces that I have seen in my 20 years of politics in Connecticut.”  Swan refutes no facts featured in the Roberti piece, just condemns it with a brush attack devoid of specifics. Then he asks recipients for $3 to help Donovan, who’s been busy calling lobbyists for contributions, fight allegations leveled by the unnamed nemesis.

Worried Republicans will be asking why Andrew Roraback can’t be more like newcomer Roberti in the Goshen Republican’s fight with Lisa Wilson Foley, also splattered by a federal criminal investigation–this one of her campaign’s investigation into its relationship with disgraced former Governor John G. Rowland.