Tito tells Walsh: ‘Speak plainly and come clean’
Mayoral candidate Tito Jackson is turning new documents filed in the federal probe into City Hall’s dealings with the Boston Calling music festival into an early campaign attack.
“This is just simply calling for the mayor to step forward, be transparent and allow us as a city to move forward and to deal with the issues that we’re sent to deal with on a day-to-day basis,” Jackson, the Roxbury councilor who is challenging Mayor Martin J. Walsh, said yesterday.
New federal court filings state Walsh sat in on two meetings about Boston Calling in March and November of 2014, as first reported on bostonherald.com yesterday.
Those filings in the case of indicted city entertainment czar Kenneth Brissette and Intergovernmental Affairs chief of staff Timothy Sullivan referred to Walsh in sessions with festival organizers. Brissette and Sullivan have been charged with attempting to extort the festival into hiring union labor.
The information about Walsh’s meetings — as well as statements that one of his staffers told Boston Calling that union reps would inflate a giant rat outside the concert on City Hall Plaza if it didn’t hire union workers, and said that would be a “problem” for the mayor — was outlined in federal court filings.
Jackson released a statement yesterday soon after the story broke saying he was “extremely troubled” by the allegations and that Walsh needed to “speak plainly and come clean rather than prolong this affair any further.”
Jackson did not say if Walsh should disclose whether he has testified before a grand jury in the Boston Calling investigation. Walsh has repeatedly refused to say if he has been called before a grand jury.
Walsh called Jackson’s statement yesterday “political posturing.”
“He was awful quiet on it before today,” Walsh said. “So maybe you should go back and ask him how come he wasn’t so vocal about it, six months, a year ago.”
When told of Walsh’s remarks, Jackson said the Boston Calling indictments had long been a distraction and the revelations of Walsh’s meetings were the latest development, and said the investigation was one of “many distractions” the Walsh administration had faced, including the Boston 2024 and Indy Car debacles.
“This is a new occurrence,” Jackson said. “What we do in City Hall every single day is focus on issues that matter, this continues to be a distraction.”