Hands Off Our Schools, the political action committee that takes aim at candidates running against state Senator Ryan Fazio, filed its January 10th campaign finance report today, February 1st, three weeks after it was due. It is a puzzlement.

Hands Off Our Schools sent two mailings to active Connecticut Republicans last fall, but there is little evidence of the expenses associated with it in the most recent report or the ones preceding it. The two cards excoriated–often erroneously–Erin Stewart, the six-tern Republican former mayor of New Britain and Fazio’s primary opponent for their party’s nomination for governor. The mailings were received after Fazio announced he would run for governor this year.

Sunday’s Hands Off Our School campaign finance filing reports the organization spent $249 between October 27th and December 31st of last year. Its October 27th filing shows no expenses. Its October 10th report lists $1,628 to PAC chair Darren Bruno for “Fees paid for services completed for Committee” and $800 for fundraising fees.

Nowhere does the committee report expenses for a mailing or expenses incurred but not paid. The mailings whacking away at Stewart appear to have been sent to a considerable number of party activists and arrived by regular mail. Some mail disappears but the cost of sending it does not.

PAC expenditures aimed at a candidate must list that candidate in its finance report. There was nothing ambiguous about the Hands Off Our Schools buckshot attacks. But they appear nowhere in the reports.

It is not the only curiosity in the 2025 Hands Off Our Schools finance reports Its January 2025 report includes a $3,900 payment to Harod Associates Limited of London for research on 2024 Fazio opponent Nick Simmons. That expenditure appeared in an amended report for the third quarter of 2024 as a deleted expenditure under incurred but not paid. The London payment disappears from the following filings until the committee’s April 10, 2025 report. The odd now-you-see-it-now- you-don’t $3,900 overseas opposition research payment to Harod Associates was made in January of last year.

George Fox of Stamford is the principal funder of the heavy-handed Hands Off Our Schools. He’s contributed $130,000 to the committee, including $50,000 on October 30th of last year. The committee ended the year with $133,000 in cash. State Representative Tracy Marra (R-Darien) contributed $10,000 on September 2nd.

Last week, Hands Off Our Schools sent text messages repeating its wild-eyed themes against Stewart.

Expect the rhetoric to intensify as the May party nominating convention draws nearer. Local parties will select delegates to the convention in March. Those meetings could bring some tests of strengths by the campaigns.

Published February 2, 2026.

UPDATE: Parents unhappy with the prospect of the Trump administration bring its idea of American history to McKinley School have caused the Friday visit to be canceled.

Greenwich Republican Linda McMahon, currently delighting in dismantling the Department of Education, will talk about history, a tricky topic for the perpetually aggrieved Trump administration, at Fairfield’s McKinley Elementary School. School administrators sounded delighted in announcing their written announcement to the “McKinley Family.”

The celebration of our besieged nation’s 250th birthday will feature “a dynamic, interactive assembly that brings American history and civic learning to life through fun, game show style activities, hands on participation, and even prizes.” Students should be prepared to answer how many January 6th insurrectionists Donald Trump pardoned. A bonus to the moppet who knows how many of those pardoned beat the daylights out of law enforcement officers protecting the Capitol from the mob. In the spirit of kids-say-the-darndest-things, the student who asks Mrs. McMahon who won the 2020 election will forever be honored of the McKinley Elementary School.

Mrs. McMahon’s visit comes as the tony metropolitan New York suburb is voting in a special election for first selectman. It will no doubt juice local Democrats to win this one for Bill Gerber, the Democrat whose sudden death caused local Republicans to force the winter contest. Another question for Friday’s event, what’s the Lacoste of Tony Hwang?

Mrs. McMahon arrives in Fairfield days after the Trump administration ordered the removal of a Philadelphia display telling the uncomfortable story of George Washington’s history of owning enslaved people and hounding those made a successful break for freedom when he brought them to the free state of Pennsylvania. That ought to be fertile ground for questions Friday.

Another stumper for any Trump administration official diving into a history game show: who launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago? What nation has abducted tens of thousand of Ukrainian children?

What American president called Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine “genius”?

If you are feeling brave, what percentage of Americans who have received a N-o-b-e-l were immigrants?

What American icon does Maria Corina Machado resemble?

What story did Donald Trump make his first wife remove from her autobiography? What visa did Melania Trump use to gain entry to the United States from Slovenia? What First Lady’s father was a Communist Party official in an enslaved nation?

McKinley Family members, make learning memorable on Friday. Connecticut is counting on you.

Published January 28, 2026.

Ronnell Higgins, commissioner of the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP), twice emphasized his “full confidence” in his agency’s ability to conduct a thorough, fair and efficient investigation of the alleged sex scandal that may involve three Troopers and a member of a private security firm. Higgins memorialized and updated previous conversations with the four statewide elected officials who have their offices at 165 Capitol Avenue in Hartford, known as the State Office Building. The four are Treasurer Erick Russell, Comptroller Sean Scanlon, Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas, and Attorney General William Tong.

The building long ago included the office of young Peter Falk, years before he gained television immortality as intrepid detective “Columbo”. Internal Affairs investigators may need some of the deceptively cunning detective skills Falk displayed on the popular show that was seen for decades on broadcast television. Internal police investigations provide a thicket of obstacles to investigators straining through employment contract provisions and labor law requirements.

The Higgins letter confirms the investigation of alleged “misconduct” at the building that “may have involved sexual activity” between one Trooper and a security employee that may have occurred at the building. State Police command at Troop H in Hartford were notified on the evening of Friday, January 16th that something was amiss at 165 Capitol Avenue. The three troopers were immediately reassigned by Colonel Daniel Loughman. A few days later, a half dozen internal affairs officers were seen in the building, likely examining the small office provided to State Troopers assigned to the building. They are also thought to have reviewed video recordings from the many cameras in the building.

On January 23rd, Loughman placed one Trooper on administrative leave and suspended his police powers after learning he attempted to enter the building “purportedly to retrieve personal items.” That attempt to enter the building was denied.

Higgins and Loughman are said to be dismayed at what they have learned so far. Higgins, who headed the Yale University police force before joining the Lamont administration, is hoping for a quicker than usual completion of the investigation that may bring considerable embarrassment on the agency.

Published January 28, 2026.

Jen Tooker, the former Westport first selectman, will seek the Republican nomination for comptroller, according to her Facebook page. That page still carries a title that refers to Tooker’s brief bid for governor but now says she is running for comptroller.

Tooker may face West Hartford Republican Mary Fay, the party’s 2022 comptroller nominee. Suffield book banner and town green scold Colin Mol is also said to be considering running for comptroller at the urging of supporters.

Tooker, who left local office after two full terms leading Westport, will need to pick up the pace on her fundraising, which was anemic in her gubernatorial campaign.

Tooker has stood out for refusing to shape her beliefs to conform with the perpetually aggrieved loathsome demagogue Donald Trump.

Published January 27, 2026.

Navy Seal and firefighter Chris Shea will seek the Republican nomination for Congress in the 5th District. The Cheshire resident’s campaign launches Thursday in Watertown, one of the state’s most Republican and QAnon-friendly towns.

Shea will face two other Republicans, Jonathan De Barros and Michele Botelho, in the dash for the party’s May nominating convention. The district has not elected a Republican since 2004.

The May convention may be followed by an August primary. The Republican nominee will face incumbent Democrat Jahana Hayes. She has held the seat since 2018.

With four Republicans running for governor and three for Congress in the 5th CD, spots on local Republican town committee agendas may be hard to wangle.

Published January 20, 2026.

Tuesday afternoon brought the release of the long-awaited audit of Blue Hills Civic Association (BHCA) and its generous grant recipient programs. The 64-page document by CliftonLarsonAllen LLP is thick with unreconciled and unaccounted for expenditures. There are references to the prominent role sate Senator Douglas McCrory (D-Bloomfield) had in determining the distribution of millions in public funds to nonprofit groups.

The audit gives a leading role to close McCrory associate Sanserae Cicero, a recipient of BHCA grants and contracts for work the auditors struggled to identify. One telling example is the revising of the BHCA employee handbook that the nonprofit paid $84,000 to Cicero’s SHEBA Consulting to perform. The auditors compared the 2007 BHCA employee handbook to the one Cicero eventually provided in 2024 and found the only differences between the two were in the formatting and presentation, not the substance.

The auditors, who are generally cautious in their conclusions, write, “The duplication of invoice line items, lack of supporting documentation, and absence of deliverables strongly suggest potential fraud and misrepresentation.”

That mysterious $84,000 to SHEBA was less than 5% of what SHEBA Consulting or Cicero received in just over a year. The audit concludes in a trio of sentences:

Over a 13-month period, BHCA distributed $1,100,200 either to SHEBA Consulting or directly to Ms. Cicero. Additionally, at the direction of Senator McCrory, BHCA was instructed to grant Ms. Cicero $615,000 in FY’25 through a passthrough of legislative funds from Upper Albany Neighborhood Collaborative. This beings the total amount of direct and indirect disbursements to $1,715,200.

Auditors could find no evidence that a $250,000 intern program that SHEBA claimed to run ever existed. SHEBA promised youths hands on experience with business experts.

Published January 20, 2026.

Jessica Gerber, widow of Fairfield’s late first selectman, Bill Gerber, has had enough of Tony Hwang, the Republican state senator who forced February 2nd’s special election. Hwang is the Republican nominee whose candidacy has been dogged by unhappy Republicans maintaining an odd silence or trying to hole his campaign below the waterline.

Jessica Gerber provided a devastating indictment of Hwang’s treatment of her late husband in the last 15 months of his life. Hwang refused to speak to Gerber because the Democrat endorsed Fairfield Democrat Rob Blanchard in his 2024 campaign for the seat Hwang holds. Democrats endorse other Democrats all the time, especially when they are friends. Hwang took considerable offense at the endorsement and, according to Jessica Gerber, stopped speaking to Bill Gerber for the rest of his life. The rest of his life—15 months.

The St. Baldrick’s event referred to in her statement is the fundraiser the Gerbers sponsored to raise money for pediatric cancer. The Gerbers’ son Teddy, died of cancer in 2010. Bill Gerber died two weeks after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor last year.

Jessica Gerber’s statement:

After we lost Bill six months ago, I took some comfort in knowing our town was left in Christine’s capable hands. I certainly did not think we needed a special election. But with that day now less than three weeks away, I want to clarify some things:

Bill and Tony Hwang were friendly, but not friends. Tony came to our St. Baldrick’s event for a number of years—some years he signed up as a shavee; other years he simply came and posed for pictures. Some years he raised money; other years, not so much.

In May 2024, Tony stopped talking to Bill after Bill publicly endorsed Rob Blanchard, Tony’s opponent in that year’s State Senate race. Rob was a friend who had worked on Bill’s First Selectman campaign. Rob even helped out during his honeymoon in Italy. Bill had never made any assurance, nor implied, that he would endorse Tony. After sending a couple of angry emails, Tony refused to talk to, acknowledge, or engage with Bill—despite the fact that they often saw one another multiple times a week.

Bill wasn’t personally upset by this strange and thin-skinned behavior; he was bemused. But what he did find noteworthy was that, because of a perceived personal slight, Fairfield’s State Senator refused to speak with Fairfield’s First Selectman for 15 months. I imagine this might have continued as long as Bill was in office. How can a State Senator truly be doing their job if they refuse to work with the leader of the largest town they represent?

This is especially concerning given the many issues they could have discussed and collaborated on during that time—the UI monopoles, the Housing Bill, and the potential Aquarion sale, to name just a few. Tony’s claims that he is the best person to run Fairfield don’t align with his past behavior, when he neglected to do the job Fairfield voters entrusted to him as their State Senator.

Recently, Tony recycled a four-year-old campaign video of his, this time with a new voiceover referencing the First Selectperson race. It opens with Tony dramatically staring at the camera and intoning, “This is not about me.” Considering his past behavior—and the personal experiences others have shared, including a high-ranking member of his own party who worked closely with him—those words ring hollow. So do his claims that he is running to “heal” and “unite” Fairfield following its First Selectman’s passing, while invoking the tragic loss of a man he refused to speak to for more than a year, and whose name he still won’t even utter in campaign videos.

I have already spoken about why I believe First Selectperson Christine Vitale should continue to lead the town of Fairfield. I hope that sharing this personal story provides important context as to why I believe that Tony Hwang should not.

Published January 19, 2026.

State Representative Maryam Khan announced Friday morning that she will launch an exploratory campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 1st State Senate District on Tuesday morning at the Parker Memorial Community Center in Hartford.

As a candidate, Khan would face incumbent Doug McCrory and fellow Windsor Democrat Ayana Taylor, who challenged McCrory in a 2024 primary. McCrory, who in his fifth term in the Senate, has announced he is seeking re-election in the face of a federal criminal investigation that has named him in subpoenas seeking information on nonprofit organizations receiving public funds.

The district includes parts of Hartford, Bloomfield, and Windsor. McCrory won the 2024 primary with 58% of the vote, defeating Taylor and Shellye Davis, a union official. Taylor won Windsor by 300 votes in the primary. McCrory took Hartford and Bloomfield.

Khan declared in a written statement, “I have launched this exploratory campaign not out of a sense of duty to self, but from a sense of duty to the people of Hartford, Windsor, and Bloomfield. Right now youth programs are being cut, public schools are in a crisis, and trust in our political system is at an all time low, and the working parents, public school students, educators, & workers of our district all deserve a sense of trust that their elected officials are in it for the public, not for themselves.”

Published January 16, 2026.

Harry Arora, a name that had slipped from view four years ago, shot into Connecticut’s political universe Tuesday. The former one-term state representative who lost his 2022 bid for state treasurer is exploring a race for governor. Arora emphasized in his announcement that received more votes than any other Republican on the statewide ballot. He nevertheless lost by a hefty 93,000 votes against first-time candidate Russell.

The investment manager is making his fifth bid for public office in eight years. Arora challenged Democrat U.S. Representative Jim Himes in 2018 and attracted just 39% of the vote in a year when Connecticut voters turned many Republicans out of office. Arora won a January 2020 special election to the state House of Representatives by 400 votes, filling the seat vacated by popular Greenwich Republican Fred Camillo, who had been elected the tony town’s first selectman the previous November. Arora was re-elected in the 2020 general election by 900 votes, winning 53% of the 13,809 votes cast.

Arora ran a brief but bitter campaign for the Republican nomination in the special election for the 36th Senate District in the summer of 2021. Incumbent Democrat Alex Kasser resigned six months into her second term. Connecticut’s election laws are at their most restrictive in special elections. The delegates from the previous nominating convention reassemble and select a nominee. The law makes no provision for a primary. Arora dropped out of the race shortly before the delegates met to select a nominee. The delegates, meeting remotely, chose 2020 nominee Ryan Fazio, over Leora Levy.

Fazio was elected in the special election and re-elected in 2022 and 2024. He is seeking the Republican nomination for governor and announced this week that he has collected enough donations to qualify for the state’s extravagant publicly funded campaign finance grant.

In his exploratory campaign announcement, Arora declared “I’m exploring this run because Connecticut is at a crossroads,” Arora said. “Our state has drifted away from the principles that made it prosperous: free enterprise, limited and efficient government, and focus on opportunity. We have to bring down the cost of energy and healthcare, address the housing shortage, and attract high-paying jobs. We can get it done by unleashing free-market forces and attracting capital, rather than creating mandates or forcing towns to urbanize. Our schools need to focus on math, science, literacy, and critical thinking, encourage parental voice, and our colleges need to prepare graduates for jobs of the 21st century.”

On a historical note, Arora over eggs the pudding with his claim that in 2022 he “achieved a milestone in Connecticut politics by becoming the first down-ballot Republican candidate to earn more votes than the top of the ticket.” Not even close. In both 1990 and 1994, three of the down-ballot Republicans received more votes than gubernatorial nominee John G. Rowland. In 1986, Gary Franks, the Waterbury Republican running for comptroller, received more votes than any other Republican on that year’s statewide ticket.

If Arora finds a lane in the Republican contest, he will join Fazio, six-term former New Britain mayor Erin Stewart, and perhaps former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey–also of Greenwich. The Republican nominee will face a Greenwich Democrat, Governor Ned Lamont.

Published January 13, 2026.

In a rare ruling from the high court bench, the Supreme Court overturned a dismissal and remanded the South Windsor town council election dispute to the Superior Court for consideration on the merits of the claim.

The decision is a victory for Harry Amadasun, the Democratic town council candidate who came in sixth of the 15 candidates running for nine town council seats. A charter revision passed on the same day as the election for municipal offices was applied to the results, turning a 6-3 Democratic victory into a 5-4 win for the party. The revised charter limited each party to no more than five members on the nine member town council. Republican Richard Balboni, the 10th place finisher, was sworn in as the fourth council member of his party.

Election disputes are often given a preference in the court system’s scheduling of litigation. The Amadsun matter will likely be heard quickly in Superior Court.

South Windsor council members are elected for two-year terms.

South Windsor Democratic Town Committee Chair Anitha Elango provide the following statement after the Court announced its decision: “The Connecticut Supreme Court’s unanimous reversal is a clear victory for democracy and for South Windsor voters. We are grateful to all who supported this effort. This fight is not over as we return to Superior Court, and we are confident the evidence will speak for itself, and Harrison Amadasun will rightfully take his seat on the Town Council, delivering the success our voters deserve.”

Published January 13, 2026.