Ned Lamont and Friday Nights.

It’s feeling like 2006.  Four years ago, Ned Lamont, running for the U.S. Senate, would use quiet summer Friday nights to announce that he had “amplified” contributions from supporters by dumping a chunk of his own fortune into his campaign.  The law requires that candidates federal office make an immediate disclosure when they give or loan their campaign money.  Lamont would time those vast infusions of cash to the sleepiest news period of the week.

Lamont, running for governor this time, is at it again.  His campaign range the cash register last week but neglected to tell the state’s powerful, anti-democratic election agency what it had received.  Lamont is required to disclose his own and other contributions to his campaign.  Under the state’s convoluted taxpayer-financed system of funding campaigns, Lamont’s contributions can trigger an increase in state funding to Democrat Dan Malloy’s campaign.

Lamont chose to announce his violation of the law that he once enthusiastically supported Friday night in an 8:27 p.m. email. The carefully worded message confesses, “Late last week, our campaign received contributions that will trigger the release of the last supplemental grant in the Democratic gubernatorial primary,” said Lamont’s Communications Director Justine Sessions.  “Due to an inadvertent oversight, the report was not filed within 48 hours of the triggering event.  When we discovered that error, we immediately contacted the SEEC and worked directly with them to file the report today.”

It’s not clear from the campaign’s statement when the error was discovered.  It appears that the report to the elections agency and the public announcement of the violation were filed at different times on Friday.  We await word from the Lamont campaign on the amount of those contributions.