Wonderful! Daren Dopp, former communications director of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is digging in his heels. He will not plead guilty even to some trivial little offense, he told The New York Times, and thereby assume the blame for the release of Sen. Joe Bruno’s travel records.
He says he was acting at the direction of Spitzer, and he says the head of the Commission on Public Integrity, Herbert Teitelbaum, is trying to protect Spitzer, an old friend, by making him, Dopp, a scapegoat.
Wonderful, because it increases the likelihood we will learn more about this fascinating episide in New York governance, and also because it will keep us newshounds in material.
Wonderful also, because we might get a better sense of the neutrality or partisanship of the Commission on Public Integrity.
Dopp was already off the reservation, so to speak, having been granted immunity by Albany County District David Soares and having testified that Spitzer gave him the go-ahead, in sulphuric language, to release the damaging travel records, but now he has taken it a step farther by implicating Teitelbaum.
As regular readers of my column know, I don’t believe there was anything wrong with releasing those records. On the contrary, I think it was a fine thing to do, to let the public know that Sen. Bruno was using state aircraft to attend Republican fund-raisers in New York City, even if it was done in a devious way. The sin was in lying about it afterwards.
If Spitzer, with the connivance of the Teitelbaum, was trying to put the whole thing on Dopp, an underling, well, let’s hear about it.
More on this subject in my column in the Tuesday edition of the Daily Gazette.