Albany’s Third Reich—Troopergate Marches On
Posted on Friday, 19 of December , 2008 at 8:53 pm
North Country Gazette
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COMMENTARY
© By June Maxam

Do you think if Fred Dicker and the New York Post filed a Freedom of Information request with the office of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, he would have to wait 30 days for a response, especially for such simple information as a salary or two?

Do you think the Attorney General’s office would specifically wait 30 days before even acknowledging such a Dicker request, particularly if it had anything to do with taxpayer funded “investigation” of the New York State Police, fueled by Dicker allegations which evolved as part of the David Paterson paranoia exhibited when he accidentally stepped into the Governor’s office in March?

Do you think that Andrew Cuomo as Attorney General and the chief prosecutor of the state should comply with all the laws of the state, including laws concerning open government?

The state’s Freedom of Information Law is found in Public Officer’s Law and provides that within five business days of the receipt of a written request for a record reasonably described, the agency must make the record available, deny access in writing giving the reasons for denial, or furnish a written acknowledgment of receipt of the request and a statement of the approximate date when the request will be granted or denied, which must be reasonable in consideration of attendant circumstances, such as the volume or complexity of the request.

The approximate date ordinarily cannot exceed 20 business days from the date of the acknowledgment of the receipt of a request.

Committee on Open Government Freedom of Information Law
Your Right To Know

But the Attorney General’s Office failed to comply with Public Officers Law and FOIL in responding to a request filed Nov. 19 by The North Country Gazette, seeking the salaries of Sharon L. McCarthy, the special prosecutor appointed by Cuomo to head the probe of the State Police and those of the two special advisors named by Cuomo, Michael Armstrong and Robert Fiske to “advise” whoever.

Although the law requires a response to a FOIL request within five business days, the AG’s office chose not to even acknowledge NCG’s request until Dec. 17, nearly 30 calendar days after submission. There was no explanation given for the delay although assistant counsel Amy Karp claimed she had been unsuccessful in emailing the response. There have been no problems with the news site’s email service.

Although the website http://seethroughny.net, maintained by the Empire Center for New York State Policy has a searchable database of salary information on more than 263,000 state employees, including those on the Attorney General’s payroll, strangely enough, McCarthy, Armstrong and Fiske are not listed.

Karp claims that McCarthy is receiving an annual salary of $140,000 plus benefits and says that that Armstrong and Fiske serve without compensation.

The lingering, money gobbling issue of the AG’s seemingly unproductive investigation of the State Police, the witch hunt of Daniel Wiese, former New York Power Authority inspector general and head of corporate security; and what appears now to be an all out Democratic effort to “get” former Republican Gov. George Pataki, for whatever motives of the Democrats, has been ongoing since late March and shows no signs of winding down.

Cuomo is still singing that “someone must have done something wrong song” at the snowballing expense of the taxpayers with money that could be must better used elsewhere.

The Attorney General’s investigation seems to be so far out of control, so far afield of the original premise, that that office itself needs to be investigated. Under the direction former federal prosecutor McCarthy, this special probe team keeps pounding the same witnesses week after week trying to get them to change the truth into something they want to hear.

Paterson's Folly

Did The New York Post have a problem finding editorial fodder for last Sunday’s paper or were they just catching up on stale material when they offered up their most recent assault on the New York State Police and retired colonel Daniel Wiese?

Or was it a case of Post “columnist” Fred Dicker doing more PR work for AG Andy Cuomo, still trying to justify the taxpayer funded “investigation” of the New York State Police, fueled by Dicker.

Frankly, the editorial wasn’t timely, contained false information and raised serious questions about who in the Attorney General’s office is leaking information to the Post.

We hope Cuomo isn’t expecting any loyalty from The Post, fickle as they are. If Cuomo has any designs on becoming Sen. Cuomo and replacing Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate when she becomes Secretary of State in the Obama administration, he won’t have the support of Dicker and Friends who have already endorsed Caroline Kennedy for the post.

If Paterson chooses Cuomo for that slot, this prolonged waste of tax dollars dictated by Paterson to chase the State Police and Wiese might end as Cuomo might finally wrap up the witch hunt of Wiese. Of course by appointing Cuomo to the Senate seat, he’d benefit himself and likely eliminate any Cuomo challenge for Governor in 2010.

In the Post’s most recent rehash of the same old attack on Wiese, this time called “Wiese-Gate”, the unsigned Post editorial bemoaned that “he recently invoked his Fifth Amendment right and declined to answer certain questions”.

How does the Post know what occurred at the last command performance of Wiese on Dec. 4? There appears to be a security leak within the AG’s office. Is the AG’s intentionally using the New York Post as its’ mouthpiece, to try and control the public perception of Daniel Wiese, to try and justify this prolonged state stalking of him and others?

When the AG interrogates “witnesses” about the supposed rogue political element in the New York State Police, the witness is told if he or she tells anyone about the “interrogation” which just occurred, he will be guilty of a misdemeanor. Of course. Armstrong and Fiske, the special advisors appointed by Cuomo to oversee the so-called investigation, have threatened if Wiese doesn’t answer the questions posed to him, that they will hold him in contempt.

They claim that state law usurps the federal Constitution and its Bill of Rights. They claim that state Executive Law provides that the “witness” cannot exercise his Fifth Amendment right and that if that witness refuses to answer a question, he’s guilty of a misdemeanor.

So, we’ll ask the question again—how does the New York Post and presumably Fred Dicker know that Wiese “recently invoked his Fifth Amendment right and declined to answer certain questions”?

Is the AG’s office going to charge itself with a misdemeanor for telling “someone” about the most recent “interrogation” of Wiese on Dec. 4, a command appearance by subpoena invitation? It’s a sure bet that neither Wiese nor his attorney talked to The Post. This “secrecy” imposed by the AG’s office and the conduct of the interrogation constitute a mentality worthy of the Third Reich and the Gestapo.

This entire inquisition, funded by hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, necessitated by Paterson and Dicker and perpetuated at a time when Paterson is proposing 137 new or increased taxes and fees to close a historic budget deficit, has morphed into a witch hunt of Republicans Wiese and former Gov. George Pataki and so far, after nearly nine months, there is no smoking gun.

It’s become a major problem. Someone will have to be charged with something in order to try and justify the escalating cost and that’s dangerous to think that someone may be falsely prosecuted in the name of politics—again. It’s time to stop throwing money at what can only be called a vendetta.

Now The Post and likely the AG’s office is frustrated because Wiese is exercising his Constitutional rights. Can you imagine that? Wiese made a blanket offer to take a lie detector test anytime, anywhere to prove that there isn’t and never was any impure and unholy political agenda within the State Police and now The Post and the Attorney General’s office are upset because he’s said to hell with you, I’m not answering the same old tired questions any more.

So far, the Attorney General’s office hasn’t taken Wiese up on his offer to submit to a polygraph, they just keep issuing subpoenas and continue on what many have deemed a “political witch hunt”.

Citizens, guilty of nothing improper, are well advised to take the Fifth when it is clear that the prosecutor is on a malicious, baseless witch hunt with political or any other improper motives.

Every innocuous word uttered, every name you name carries the possibility of extending and prolonging the madness, the inquisition conducted by those in POWER without a vague understanding of the fact that it is their obligation to conduct investigations in good faith and not to destroy careers or lives based upon assumptions, suppositions, guesswork or maliciously inspired wishful thinking with a self-serving political agenda.

The questioning/interrogations have actually descended to illogical, moronic levels. For example, how can you say you don’t know John X, when you say you know Bill X, who has admitted HE knows John X. Do you know what the penalty is for lying to us???”

Is Cuomo’s special prosecutor and his two special advisors taking a page out of the play book of the Third Reich? Gestapo interrogation methods were simple: torture them until they talk. In the case of Wiese, it’s take away his job, his reputation, trash his ability to find new employment and cost him thousands of dollars in hiring legal counsel.

Under Gestapo methods, even if the prisoners had absolutely nothing of value to relate, they eventually broke down under the methods and blurted out whatever they thought the interrogators wanted to hear, just to end the inquisition. Once they had, they were sent off to their death at the extermination camp and if they choose not to lie—to continue telling the truth—then the torture continued and the interrogation went on and on and on. These seem to be the methods being employed in what has become known as the Troopergate scandal.

Troopergate has become a War of the Worlds. It’s the New York State Police and Wiese v. Cuomo and the New York Post/Fred Dicker.

In 1930s Nazi Germany, the Gestapo was the Secret State Police, it was a dual combination of security police and the secret state police, kind of like the state Attorney General’s office. The Gestapo had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases and any case in which they believed was an attack on the Party and the Government. That’s a lot like that Executive Order that Paterson signed giving Cuomo the Power to investigate Dicker’s speculation that there MIGHT be political interference in the State Police by that phantom “rogue” element.

“As you are aware by letter dated March 31, Paterson directed the Attorney General to conduct an investigation pursuant to Executive Law Sections 63(3) and 63(8) into whether there has been political interference with the NYSP”, Michael F. Armstrong and Robert B. Fiske Jr, told Wiese’s attorney Kevin Kitson on Nov. 25 after Kitson told them that the investigation originally commenced in April “has drifted far astray of its purpose”.

Armstrong and Fiske are the special advisors appointed by Cuomo to oversee the “investigation” and threatened if Wiese didn’t answer the questions posed to him, he would be held in contempt.

“The Governor’s mandate is broad and does not in any way limit the investigation in time. Nor is the investigation limited to determining whether there is a ‘rogue unit of the State Police’. Indeed that language appears nowhere in the Governor’s letter”, Armstrong and Fiske told Kitson, in essence claiming that they can embark down whatever Yellow Brick Road they want and go on whatever wild goose chase they desire, all at the expense of the taxpayers for as long as they want while of course they, special prosecutor Sharon McCarthy and whatever staff they have acquired are on the public payroll.

Wiese, a retired colonel in the New York State Police, former head of the Executive Security Detail for former Gov. George Pataki and ousted inspector general of the New York Power Authority, has been at the heart of the investigation which is being headed by McCarthy and is now in its ninth month.

“The AG’s office, under the guise of conducting a legitimate and authorized investigation, has gone far afield without any regard for the injustices caused thereby”. Wiese’s attorney told the Attorney General’s office on Nov. 17. “In fact, the investigation which you are overseeing, I respectfully suggest, has taken on tones worthy of Joe McCarthy or Maurice Nadjari”.

“The original direction given to the New York Attorney General by Gov. Paterson has been ignored and the accompanying power abused”, Kitson told Armstrong and Fiske. “What started out as an inquiry into the existence of a rogue unit of the State Police has now, some eight months later, become aimless harassment of Mr. Wiese and others, driven not by facts, but by the need to find some justification for the investigation, and I suggest, political motives. After these many months, I do not know what is being investigated”.

Yet another parallel to the Gestapo. Paterson has in essence claimed that Dan Wiese has been disloyal to the government and that the State Police might have been assembling dossiers of certain lawmakers who may have been engaged in wrongdoing. Isn’t that what the State Police are paid to do, guard the public safety? And given the track record of some of the state’s legislators, it’s a damn good thing that SOMEBODY is watching them.

A law passed by the German government in 1936 gave the Gestapo carte blanche to operate without judicial oversight. Isn’t that what Cuomo and his prosecutors are trying to do, claiming that they have the POWER, that they are autonomous, that they are exempted from the Constitution, the laws of our land, from the courts? That’s dangerous.

Have Paterson and Cuomo adopted the 1930 German sentiment that “Power will keep us safe. We are the good people, the ones who want to clear the planet earth of all who hinder progress, of all who stand in the way of our good intentions—and the more power our Empire has, the safer we will be, the safer we will make the world”?

You know where that mentality led the Germans.

In 1930’s Germany, it was completely proper, fitting and expected for persons to turn in to the authorities anyone even remotely suspected of in some way subverting the government. Is that’s what happening in New York State? Discredit and disarm your critics or political enemies before they can expose government wrongdoing?

Wiese was ousted earlier this year as Inspector General and director of corporate security at the New York Power Authority after he blew the whistle on two members of the New York Power Authority board of trustees, D. Patrick Curley of Orchard Park and James A. Besha of the Town of Berne, Albany County, patronage appointees of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

When’s the investigation of those two going to commence? Is this another political payback, smoke and mirrors deal? Turn the table on Wiese, point the finger at him before he’s successful in exposing them and the other Democratic patronage which now exists at the New York Power Authority?

Sources close to Wiese say he was fired at the insistence of Besha and Curley. Wiese had allegedly reported to Spitzer, just prior to the Spitzer prostitute scandal, that Besha and Curley had conflicts of interest with Besha and his firm, Albany Engineering Corporation, owning a power plant on the Hudson River.

In late March, just days before Wiese’s suspension, Besha’s firm announced that it had acquired ownership of the historic Stuyvesant Falls Hydroelectric Station in the Columbia County town of Stuyvesant. Albany Engineering also owns a hydro station in Mechanicville and is involved in an attempt by the Green Island Power Authority to take a federal license from the School Street Station in Cohoes to operate its own hydro station on the Mohawk River.

Curley of Buffalo, is a lobbyist and president of St. Lawrence Business Consultants, a financial consulting firm with clients in banking, manufacturing, education and various other interests in the private, public and non-for-profit sectors.

The irony of the situation is that former NYPA president Roger Kelley, who Paterson fired himself in June, three weeks after Wiese’s termination, had allegedly asked Wiese to blow the whistle on Curley and Besha but then did nothing to support Wiese when they reportedly insisted that Wiese be fired in a retaliatory move.

In its Sunday hit piece, allegedly commissioned by the AG’s office, The Post says that Wiese “seems to have devoted much energy to hiding information from prosecutors”. Truth: He volunteered to submit to a polygraph, or “any number of polygraph examinations, by examiners not of my choosing, on any of the issues…or on any other issues which the (NYPA) board may deem relevant or appropriate”.

No one chose to take him up on his offer. Of course it makes for better editorial material for The Post to say that Wiese is “hiding information from prosecutors”. In that the whole thing is being kept so secret under threat of arrest if any witness “talks”, just how does the public really know what Wiese has told them, probably things that they didn’t want to hear.

Let’s not forget that The Post has as much as stake in finding a scapegoat as the AG’s office as it was The Post and Dicker that alleged that the State Police had been “secretly compiling personal information on New York officials, maybe even Paterson himself”. Will The Post and Rupert Murdoch reimburse the taxpayers of the State of New York for this wild goose chase that Dicker has caused? Let’s not forget that Dicker and The Post have their own personal reasons to “get Wiese”.

The Post claims that “after Cuomo asked for Wiese’s e-mails, they mysteriously were deleted”. Wrong, more untrue hype by The Post and likely fueled by both Cuomo and Dicker. After the NYPA received Cuomo’s May 6 letter charging that emails had been erased from Wiese’s computer, Wiese’s attorney charged that “someone within NYPA immediately thereafter telephoned the newspaper source who has been fueling the flames of baseless anti-Wiese/rogue police element stories, to advise the reporter, Fred Dicker, of the Attorney General’s misinformed accusatory letter, one of several apparent “leaks” within the Power Authority to Dicker”.

Cuomo made so far unsubstantiated allegations against Wiese which were highly, publicized by Dicker and the Post when Cuomo accused Wiese and other NYPA officials of taking “affirmative steps….to purposefully destroy responsive information, specifically emails on the Blackberry of Daniel Wiese”.

The main point is that there is and always has been a backup to those emails that Cuomo claims were erased. It just sells more papers—jacks up the circulation figures—to print that Wiese “mysteriously deleted” his e-mails.

Wiese categorically denies any intentional erasure and said that his Blackberry had “malfunctioned” in March and that in order to resolve the technical issue, the Power Authority’s information technology specialist, Dominick Daniello, had told him he had had to “reboot” the Blackberry. However, Wiese says, there was a computer backup to the Blackberry and nothing was deleted from his computer.

“The deletion of the material happened before Cuomo announced any investigation”, Wiese’s attorney says, “and NYPA CEO Roger Kelley knew it.”

Knowledgeable sources have told The North Country Gazette that the Attorney General’s office has “been doing back flips” trying to get Daniello who erased Wiese’s Blackberry to say that Wiese told him to do so. Daniello says it was his idea to reboot the frozen Blackberry which ultimately resulted in the lost e-mails. Additionally sources say, if investigators will look at Wiese’s computer, they will find the same information—-which is nothing of interest.

The AG’s office has interrogated Daniello about five times, essentially begging him to change his story to say Wiese told him to do it, that it was Wiese’s idea, that the thing didn’t have to be rebooted. They apparently want him to lie to help justify the millions spent on absolutely nothing of consequence. http://www.northcountrygazette.org/2008/07/17/wiese_strikes/

In Sunday’s editorial, The Post also continued the 12-year-old bitch that Wiese “pleaded the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions about a Pataki-era scandal”.

In regard to Wiese’s involvement in the 1997 federal investigation about the alleged sale of paroles by officials in the Pataki administration, one reliable source has told NCG that Wiese’s claimed assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights when questioned by a federal grand jury in the matter was illegally leaked to the media by the assistant U.S. attorney on the case who was frustrated over her failure to indict her targets and an alleged attempt to smear Pataki for political reasons. Several parole officials were convicted of criminal charges in the case but no charges were brought against Wiese or Pataki, apparently something that still sticks in the craw of Dicker, The Post and others.

According to the source, the prosecutor’s boyfriend was a state trooper fired by Wiese and when she failed in her efforts to indict Wiese and destroy his career at that time, the Fifth Amendment story was allegedly planted.

Wiese has been questioned repeatedly about the decade-old case and the AG’s office continues to drum on it, trying to find a different answer, change the facts.

The Post says that Cuomo “is right to dig for all pertinent information about all the dirty tricks that may have been played under Spitzer and ex-Gov. George Pataki. Has Dicker been subpoenaed and interrogated yet? In our view, that’s where a lot of the dirty tricks roost. It appears that Dicker and The Post are the ones trying to cover up the coverups.

It also appears that Dicker and The Post may both harbor a grudge and be looking for revenge, to “get even” with Wiese.

Sources speculate that Dicker and The New York Post are biased towards Wiese as a result of The Post Company being indicted in 1992 by the Manhattan district attorney’s office for a scheme by two Post executives that inflated the newspaper’s daily circulation figures by 50,000 copies.

Wiese was an investigator in the Manhattan district attorney’s office under Robert Morgenthau at the time of the indictment. The Post Company pleaded guilty to a felony charge of fraud and was fined $10,000. In connection with the overstated circulation figures, Richard T. Nasti, Post vice president and general manger, and Steven Bumbaca, Post vice president and controller, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of violating state finance laws. Both received a conditional discharge, allowing them to escape jail time and fines.

A state indictment in 1991 had initially charged that through control of a news carriers union, a Mafia family stole more than 10,000 copies of The New York Post a day over five years and used the newspaper’s loading docks as headquarters for extortions, loan sharking, gun sales and the engineering of narcotics deals. As a spinoff of that investigation, officials uncovered the scheme by the Post executives to intentionally inflate the newspaper’s daily circulation figures by 50,000 copies for five years.

The organized-crime indictment asserted that a ring led by the Bonanno crime family “exercised control” over the Post’s circulation since 1987. An 82-year-old capo, or captain, in the family, Al Embarrato, who was a delivery foreman for The Post delivery foreman, directed the racketeering, the indictment said.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/web/nycantarella.htm

In July of 1992, as a result of a two-year investigation into organized crime’s penetration of New York newspaper deliveries, Wiese, the district attorney’s office and others also uncovered evidence of the theft of about 20,000 newspapers a day at The Daily News in 1991.

It was alleged that that theft was organized by members of the Colombo and Lucchese crime families and that it followed the pattern of similar thefts uncovered previously at The New York Post in 1991 by the Bonanno crime family.

Wiese, then a sergeant, filed an affidavit in state Supreme Court in Manhattan as an investigator for the Manhattan district attorney affirming that the Daily News had estimated that the thefts had cost the company over a $1 million annually when it was in bankruptcy.

Wiese had stated in the affidavit, filed with the court in January, 1992, that “The investigation thus far has also revealed that certain high-level members of The Daily News management are involved in a sophisticated fraud that involves the inflation of circulation figures in order to withhold millions of dollars in rebates from advertisers.”

Is it any wonder that certain members of the media are biased towards Wiese?

The circulation manager of the NY Daily News, Donald Nizen, resigned in mid-1992. Nizen had held a similar position at The New York Post when the thefts occurred there.

As head of the Governor’s security, Wiese also wielded considerable influence regarding the press corps at the Capitol. When Wiese had the second floor of the Capitol closed off to the public in 1995, he reportedly ousted Dicker from his “roost”. Dicker bitterly complained that Wiese had created “Fort Pataki” and allegedly resented Wiese’s action to keep him further from the Governor and other Capitol sources. Wiese says Dicker “has never forgotten that conflict and continues to harbor a bias which is renowned—regardless of the unjust consequences to me”.

http://www.northcountrygazette.org/2008/06/02/pricks_patronage_politics/

No longer did reporters such as Dicker have free access to the state’s chief executive and his staff. And Dicker carried that vendetta forward, in 2005 stating that “I have never seen the degree of secrecy that we have in this government,” he said. “The hostility to the press, the unrelenting suspicion of the press, the lack of any respect for the Fourth Estate-it’s like they’re turning the clock back to before Watergate.”

In 2006, Dicker found himself on the receiving end of a federal subpoena after articles concerning recorded telephone conversations involving Gov. Pataki, his wife, top aides and others. Dicker wrote about the taped recordings after he allegedly received anonymously an audiotape of the conversations. Recording telephone conversations without a court order is illegal in New York State unless one of the parties to the conversation is aware of the taping.

Dicker lashed out at Pataki, reporting on the conversations which discussed patronage appointments by the Pataki administration and Libby Pataki complaining about not getting enough publicity.

Is this an attempt by both The Post and Dicker to get even with Pataki?

In 2007, Dicker got a taste of his own medicine when the Daily News reported that Dicker would have to return a $1,000 honorarium he had taken from the New York Bankers Association, a group which lobbies the state government that Dicker covers. Dicker had reportedly been taking the money for several years.

“While speaking to groups is fine for journalists, taking money from one involved with the government a reporter covers is a conflict of interest, according to Kelly McBride, head of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute.

Dicker’s employer, the New York Post, supported Spitzer for Governor and for a time, it seemed that Dicker did too, at least until Spitzer didn’t reopen Fort Pataki.

After the Spitzer prostitute scandal was exposed, Dicker bombastically stated that he knew Spitzer “was a fraud and hypocrite from the day he swaggered into the Capitol”.

“From the start of his term, I spotted signs of trouble”, Dicker said in a turnabout. “Spitzer told me that—in a gesture of openness—he would lift some of the harsh “Fort Pataki” security that had been imposed on the Capitol—well before the 9/11 attacks—to help then Gov. George Pataki avoid contacts with the public”.

But Spitzer didn’t do that, further raising the ire of Dicker.

Wiese’s last interrogation on Dec. 4 apparently bore no fruit for the Attorney General, not due to any fault of the AG or for lack of trying…..and trying……and trying…. simply because there’s likely nothing left to “investigate” that amounts to more than a jay walking citation, or perhaps loitering with intent to gawk.

It certainly appears as though the focus has shifted from Wiese to Pataki and they want Wiese to hand them their GOP target on a silver platter. Perhaps Pataki has really been the target all along. Nine months, thousands of “documents” subpoenaed, dozens upon dozens of “citizens” abused, threatened and deposed because they may know something about someone or something which may or may not have happened, which may or may not be illegal, millions of taxpayer dollars flushed down the drain in pursuit of activities which did not occur and crimes which do not exist , and still not a shred of evidence uncovered, not one shred, worthy of a mundane traffic violation.

Don’t you think if they had found something, anything that they could prosecute, could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they would have charged somebody—that is if they’re looking at the right people and there’s still a lot of doubt that the AG’s office is focused in the right place if they really want to uncover wrongdoing.

Keep pounding away Dems, continue to burn those hard earned tax dollars, and the most you will get out of it is exactly what you just got, a short “story” replete with half-truths and misleading statements known as an Editorial in the “prestigious” New York Post.

The attacks on Wiese by the New York Post and Dicker sure appear on the surface to be little more than baseless payback and cheap shots.

Presumably not even the Attorney General’s office can prosecute someone for something they didn’t do or something no one did or something that is not illegal or something for which there is no evidence or for something which has no victim or something which only exists in the mind of a paranoid Governor who acquired his position in a freaky, accidental manner, or something which would scream itself off the pages of “Alice in Wonderland” had the author been sufficiently demented in the phase of imagination to concoct such a scenario in lieu of Alice’s actual experiences.

Or can they? Will they? 12-19-08

WIESE-GATE?
NY POST, December 14, 2008
LINK

No one should be surrised that retired State Police Col. Dan Wiese is refusing to cooperate with a high-level probe that grew out of the Spitzer-era Troopergate scandal.

After all, despite a law-enforcement career supposedly devoted to unearthing and punishing wrongdoing, Wiese seems to have devoted much energy to hiding information from prosecutors.

Wiese's lawyer, Kevin Kitson, says he and his client won't cooperate with the probe that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office is conducting at the behest of Gov. Paterson. Indeed, he recently invoked his Fifth Amendment right and declined to answer certain questions.

The governor asked for the probe after The Post reported allegations that the State Police had been secretly compiling personal information on New York officials, maybe even Paterson himself.

Such activity, which is said to have begun during the Pataki era, would be a logical forerunner of Troopergate. In that sordid affair, aides to then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer had the State Police prepare and leak reports about ex-Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's travel plans in an attempt to damage him politically.

Wiese's evasions, though, merely heighten suspicion that he has something to hide - such as, perhaps, his own role, or that of others, in the dirty tricks Cuomo is probing.

Indeed, the pattern is unmistakable:

*After Cuomo asked for Wiese's e-mails, they mysteriously were deleted.

* A decade ago, Wiese pleaded the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions about a Pataki-era scandal. A number of officials were convicted in that case, but Wiese - and who knows who else? - skated free.

Now Kitson says Wiese won't cooperate with Cuomo or comply with a subpoena from his office. He says Cuomo & Co. are asking about that 10-year-old scandal and have "gone far afield" of the probe's original goals.

"After these many months," Kitson said, "I do not know what is being investigated." He said the probe has "taken on tones worthy of Joe McCarthy."

Seems like Fifth Amendment déjà vu all over again.

Of course Cuomo is right to dig for all pertinent information about all the dirty tricks that may have been played under Spitzer and ex-Gov. George Pataki.

That kind of abuse by law enforcement is wholly intolerable. Perpetrators need to be identified and prosecuted for any crimes they may have committed.

Wiese can try to cover up the history - or even cover up the coverups.

But if he has nothing to hide, then he'd have no valid reason not to cooperate.

His silence, on the other hand, speaks volumes.