More Notes on Surviving a Scandal.
The state contracting scandal continues to engulf Governor Ned Lamont’s administration. Lamont’s strategy appears to be a series of shrugs and dismissals of each new revelation. We know that federal criminal investigators are casting a wide net to gather evidence on how and why state contracts for construction, demolition and hazardous abatement were steered to favored businesses.
A corruption scandal of this reach always touches more than the central figures. It may ensnare the culpable and the innocent. Daily Ructions offered advice for surviving a scandal on February 6th. Recent events prompt more.
As day follows night, home improvements are a constant in Connecticut corruption scandals. They are closing in on you if you see any of the following on a subpoena: kitchen, basement, estimates, contracts, and receipts.
If you failed to obtain building permits for home improvements, do not slither into your local town hall now to apply for them while explaining you forgot all about the application and the fees in the rush of construction.
If investigators start poking around a delightful Farmington restaurant for records and recollections of who paid for meals there with contractors, start hunting for receipts and ethics disclosures.
As you assess your situation with the assistance of competent counsel, learn what a proffer is. Criminal defense lawyers refer to it as a Queen for a Day Letter. Learn more about it here.
Read documents. Governor Lamont continues to appear hopelessly muddled as he struggles to explain why he knew nothing and saw nothing, absolutely nothing, about the scandal that is staining his administration. The Twardy report is 42 pages of narrative. The sorry tale flows in the telling, even with some omissions. A document compiled in the summer of 2020 by building trades unions association and given to Lamont’s office is two and a half pages. In his befuddled explanation of why he did not see the document, Lamont said last week that the union representatives wanted most to talk about project labor agreements, PLAs. They never got to warnings about Kostaninos Diamantis’s abuse of the school construction grants program. The Yale business school graduate seemed not to remember that the union complaints about PLAs centered solely on Diamantis. It’s right there in that concise memo. Read the documents before commenting on them with misplaced confidence.
If an element of your defense is that you have been mistreated by the powerful, you’d better not have berated, embarrassed or made subordinates cry. If you required those who worked for to get your coffee or lunch, your bid for victimhood will be undermined. A directive to deliver documents to the boss at home is in no public employee’s job description.
Criminal investigations and the subsequent prosecutions can disrupt domestic harmony. Understand the complexities of the doctrines of spousal communications and spousal privilege in criminal prosecutions. As an example of its complexities, the smartest lawyer I know pointed out that it is intended to protect the sanctity of marriage–where it has not already been shredded by the acts of one or both spouses.
If you are sure you deserve to keep or be reinstated to your state job, insist the state labor panel hearing your claim open your hearing to the public. If you are confident of your case, let in the light.
It is imprudent to declare how talented and accomplished you are while also claiming you saw nothing, you knew nothing. Prosecutors are not persuaded by people who insist they are smart about everything but what went on in front of them.
Published on February 22, 2022.