Defense lawyers: Where was Blumenthal?

 

 

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer

 

HARTFORD -- Days after federal prosecutors charged that a criminal enterprise had been run from former Gov. John G. Rowland’s office, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced a lawsuit of his own.

The lawsuit condemned many of the officials who had a hand in delivering some allegedly corrupt, state contracts.

But criminal defense attorneys say there’s one name glaringly absent from both the lawsuit and the discussion: Blumenthal’s.

How, they ask, did the state’s top lawyer miss the fact that state agencies, his clients, were being corrupted? Where was Blumenthal?

"You know where the attorney general was?" said defense attorney William Sweeney. "Approving all the contracts."
Blumenthal is Connecticut’s lawyer. By law, he supervises all non-criminal legal matters. He approves state contracts. He advises department heads on legal matters. He sits on the State Bond Commission, which doles out money for projects and which prosecutors say was manipulated as part of the conspiracy.

When state officials allegedly steered tens of millions of dollars in contracts to a favorite company, however, Blumenthal said they kept his office out of the loop.

"We weren’t involved in any of the process," Blumenthal said. "None of the lawyers from this office, none of the lawyers in house at the (Department of Public Works) or Department of Children and Families had any involvement in these contracts."

Blumenthal’s attorneys reviewed and approved the contracts, but only for form. Once a company is approved and a contract is issued, Blumenthal’s lawyers make sure the documents are on solid legal footing, not that they’ve been issued fairly.

Blumenthal said state officials never asked for his legal advice. By the time he saw a $57 million construction contract, he said it had already been steered to the Tomasso Group, a politically connected contractor with ties to Rowland’s administration.

Prosecutors say Rowland’s former top aide, Peter Ellef, his deputy, Lawrence Alibozek and William Tomasso, the former president of the Tomasso Group, conspired to steer state contracts. "Isn’t the AG’s office the appointed watchdog of the validity and legality of contracts in the state of Connecticut?" said Hugh Keefe, Ellef’s attorney.

The answer to that is murky because Blumenthal is both the attorney for the state and the investigator of state misdeeds. He works to keep state officials out of court and occasionally hauls them into court.
"It is an inherent conflict, but not one the rules governing his office really address," said Thomas Morawetz, a University of Connecticut Law School professor of ethics.

Blumenthal is also an elected Democrat representing a Republican administration, and every few years he’s mentioned as candidate to unseat that administration. That relationship makes it less likely state officials will seek his advice, said Santa Mendoza, a Hartford attorney and a member of the State Elections Enforcement Commission who once ran against Blumenthal. "When Blumenthal says something, there’s no trust there," Mendoza said. "Is he protecting me or is he exposing me? Is he setting me up? It’s nothing personal. It’s the system."

When DPW Commissioner James Fleming took over last year, he said the lack of legal oversight was palatable. So he hired his own lawyers to advise the agency. Fleming is working with Blumenthal and others to change the way contracts are issued. They are calling for a review panel to scrutinize every contract. Blumenthal said early this year that he won’t sign state contracts unless companies reveal all their gifts to state employees. In hindsight, Fleming said, many agencies could have done more. "What the AG could have done, if he felt there was a problem with a contract, he could have gone to the commissioner and said, ‘You need to pull the contract,’" Fleming said. "I don’t know all the details of why that didn’t happen."

"Tomasso and Ellef were figuratively joined at the hip. That was a well-known fact all over the Capitol," said Sweeney, who represents former state DPW official P.J. Delahunty, one of those named in Blumenthal’s suit. "How is that it doesn’t raise the specter of some favoritism to the attorney general when this company gets a $57 million no-bid contract?"

Andy Sauer of the clean-government group Common Cause said that question is fair game if Blumenthal is in the governor’s race next year.

"Either he suspected it and did nothing about it or he didn’t catch it," Sauer said.

 Blumenthal would not discuss the politics of the scandal but said it’s absurd to suggest he had any knowledge that would have tipped him off to the corruption. "I can tell you absolutely, unhesitatingly, I had no inkling about the relationship between Tomasso and Ellef, Ellef and Alibozek or any of these characters," Blumen-thal said. "I just had no more reason to suspect wrongdoing than the ordinary person on the street."