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The New York Times: The Feuding by Bruno and Spitzer Turns Bitter

EXTRACTS: The State Ethics Commission has said that officials are allowed to conduct political business while on official trips without reimbursing the state for the political portion of the travel. Participants in some of Mr. Bruno’s trips said there were discussions of nonpolitical activities. “We did meet with Bruno on energy issues in general and the Broadwater project specifically,” said Bruce Gyory, a lobbyist who helped arrange a May 17 meeting in New York City between Mr. Bruno and executives of his client, TransCanada, and Shell. The two companies are partners in Broadwater, a project to build a natural gas facility in Long Island Sound.
 
BY DANNY HAKIM and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: July 6, 2007

ALBANY, July 5 — After three months of what has seemed like constant fighting, Gov. Eliot Spitzer on Thursday called his antagonist, Senator Joseph L. Bruno, and asked for a meeting. 

Like everything else between the two men, the meeting invitation is now the subject of a disagreement. (Mr. Bruno’s staff says the governor invited him to his farmhouse in Columbia County; Mr. Spitzer’s aides said he offered to meet Mr. Bruno anywhere he wanted.)

The meeting never happened, and the two men are continuing to feud after Mr. Spitzer’s staff suggested Mr. Bruno may have improperly used State Police escorts and helicopters and Mr. Bruno then suggested that Mr. Spitzer was spying on him.

The state inspector general said she would investigate Mr. Bruno’s allegations that the Spitzer administration used the State Police to “conduct surveillance” of his whereabouts.

The governor’s staff vigorously disputed the allegations but agreed to allow the inspector general, Kristine Hamann, an appointee of the governor, to review the matter. Mr. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, has also called for the attorney general and the Albany County district attorney to convene grand juries to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing.

The investigations may not stop there. Joseph N. Mondello, the state Republican Party chairman, called Thursday for the appointment of a special prosecutor, and Mr. Bruno said he would consider having a Senate committee conduct hearings as well.

The most recent dispute between the men began after The Times Union of Albany reported last weekend that the senator had used state helicopters and State Police escorts during trips to New York City, pointing out that they coincided with Republican fund-raisers.

Mr. Bruno has been adamant in saying that he also conducted state business during those trips and has expressed outrage that the administration turned over State Police logs of his trips to the newspaper, records he was not aware were being kept. The logs were the subject of a report Thursday in The New York Post, which said similar logs were not maintained for the governor or other state officials.

Darren Dopp, the governor’s communications director, called the Post report “grossly inaccurate.” He said state officials generally gave State Police detailed itineraries when they were using state transportation. The troopers did not retain all the itineraries Mr. Bruno’s office supplied, he said, so they the troopers reconstructed some of them after The Times Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Spitzer administration for the records.

The State Police have been reluctant in the past to disclose information relating to the security of public officials. Lt. Glenn Miner, a spokesman for the State Police, an agency within the executive branch, said the police provided the reconstructed itineraries because the governor’s office asked them to. “We did it as a request from the governor’s office,” Lieutenant Miner said.

He said the agency did not maintain special travel records about any state officials. The agency, he added, generally relies on schedules provided by the officials themselves to plan transportation, including flights on state aircraft, which must be approved by the governor, and ground escorts by state troopers. Those schedules are not considered agency records, Lieutenant Miner said, and there is no internal rule governing how long they are retained.

The State Police provided both a travel itinerary supplied by Mr. Bruno’s office and synopses of Mr. Bruno’s travel on days for which the agency no longer had those schedules, based on the recollections of the troopers who had accompanied him.

The two pages of itineraries consist of details of each stop made on the senator’s trips. At 7 p.m. on May 3, for example, Mr. Bruno is said to have stopped for dinner “at Italian restaurant on East Side (unknown name, located between First Avenue and Second Avenue in the upper 40s).” At 11 p.m., he was “transported back to Sheraton Hotel.”

Lawyers in Mr. Bruno’s office said they believed that the Spitzer administration’s orders to keep logs of Mr. Bruno’s travel might have been an act of official misconduct, a misdemeanor that is an impeachable offense. They also said they thought the administration might have violated the Civil Service Law related to using public employees for political activity and the Public Officers Law relating to securing unwarranted privileges.

Mr. Spitzer’s aides said the idea that any laws were broken was ridiculous. They said the governor’s itineraries have also been made public. As a result there was no need for the State Police to reconstruct a record of the governor’s whereabouts, they said.

“No special records are kept beyond a simple accounting of a State Police vehicle’s use,” Mr. Dopp said.

On Thursday, government watchdog groups called on lawmakers to approve new rules requiring reimbursements when officials use “state resources” to “facilitate partisan activity.”

The battle has brought the relations of the state’s top Democrat and top Republican to an impasse and threatens to derail a host of issues being negotiated. The Albany County district attorney, P. David Soares, has been called on to conduct three investigations related to the dispute, although he has only two people in his public integrity office.

At a press conference Thursday, Mr. Bruno called the governor’s aides “hoodlums” and “thugs.” He said he would only meet with the governor publicly to avoid having his comments mischaracterized. He said the governor’s “dangerous abuse of power is despicable, possibly illegal and undermines our democratic form of government.”

The Spitzer administration fired back, saying that there had been nothing like surveillance of Mr. Bruno.

“We are confident that proper procedures were followed at all times,” Mr. Dopp said. “However, since a concern has been raised, we are asking the state inspector general to review the matter.”

The State Ethics Commission has said that officials are allowed to conduct political business while on official trips without reimbursing the state for the political portion of the travel.

Participants in some of Mr. Bruno’s trips said there were discussions of nonpolitical activities.

“We did meet with Bruno on energy issues in general and the Broadwater project specifically,” said Bruce Gyory, a lobbyist who helped arrange a May 17 meeting in New York City between Mr. Bruno and executives of his client, TransCanada, and Shell. The two companies are partners in Broadwater, a project to build a natural gas facility in Long Island Sound.

That evening, Mr. Bruno attended a fund-raiser for the Republican State Committee, but Mr. Gyory described the earlier meeting as substantive, not political. “It was a substantive meeting,” Mr. Gyory said. “It has nothing to do with fund-raising. Nobody from our group was participating, nobody raised money, nobody went to the fund-raiser.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/nyregion/06spitzer.html?pagewanted=all

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