Elections Agency Enforcement Coup.
The bureaucrats at the state’s most powerful political bureaucracy who want to shovel millions into political campaigns strengthened their control of the State Elections Enforcement Agency Thursday afternoon, according to The Hartford Courant. Veteran SEEC lawyer Joan Andrews was taken down in an internal SEEC coup that decapitated the agency’s enforcement office.
There are opposing explanations for the sudden move that left Andrews with an offer to take a lower paying job at the Department of Labor. Andrews thinks that she was canned because she was too vigilant in her enforcement policy. Public financing of campaign’s most relentless advocate Beth Rotman, who heads the Citizen’s Election Program and is emerging as the most influential person at the agency, backed the director of the SEEC, Albert Lenge. Rotman praised Lenge’s actions. “It is always difficult to make hard decisions, but the executive director carefully considered various options and made a decision to streamline the legal department to provide more timely action,” Rotman declared.
If Lenge and Rotman are committed to a streamlined process and timely action, they can prove it by acting on the complaint filed nearly a year ago by Jonathan Pelto alleging collusion between Governor M. Jodi Rell’s office and state contractor and UConn professor and pollster Kenneth Dautrich to benefit Rell’s political prospects through her campaign committee. Acting on that cozy relationship would provide some proof that the political players at the SEEC are willing to make hard decisions to demonstrate that the lavishly funded agency will begin to engage in the vigorous enforcement of the state’s expensive election laws.
6 comments
I’ve heard that more than a couple of folks within the SEEC weren’t happy with the way CEP was interpreted and applied during the Republican primary. Laying off Joan probably sent a pretty strong message to any other naysayers to shut the hell up, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see more movement. Kudos to Joan for having the balls to speak up instead of going quietly into the night.
Has anyone resolved what the deal with Boughton is? By statute, he and Foley must form a joint committee soon. It seems a little bizarre that a candidate who accepted public funds for a primary will now be required to campaign jointly with someone who’s not participating in the program in the slightest.
Watching Foley and Chris Healy attack Dan Malloy for accepting CEP funds will become tiresomely ironic given that political welfare candidate Mark Boughton is the official GOP nominee.
“By statute, he and Foley must form a joint committee soon. ”
Wrong Fuzzy, there’s no such statute.
I think that getting rid of Joan Andrews was not a good thing. She’s very intelligent, professional, she knows her stuff and her integrity cannot be questioned. She’s outspoken but not in a bad way. It’s too bad that she’s leaving.
When the inevitable scandal explodes, the powers that be will all fake ammesia about whose idea it was to euthanize the watchdog
Rotman’s gone too. Where’s Kevin’s breaking news on this one?
She appears to be quitting instead of getting shitcanned. Moving overseas.
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