Okay, so it was legal to publish, now what?

There is an old saying that’s been said lots of times in lots of ways, but it goes something like “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

Hamilton Mayor Kelly Yaede went all out to hire one of the area’s biggest names in lawyering, Robin Lord, to make sure charges were dismissed on her disorderly persons case.

You’ll notice that the argument made in court said that Yaede and her then-campaign-manager Dan Scharfenberger had the right to publish expunged records about her primary candidate, David Henderson, just because they were legally obtained.

We’ll take that argument a step further, being that we love publishing information that makes some people upset. We don’t care if the documents were legally obtained or not, they still should have been published.

When a candidate enters the arena, all bets are off in modern politics. Arrested? Yep. Convicted? Nope. Expunged? That’s where this one gets complicated.

But the voters in Hamilton deserved to know the truth about Henderson’s arrest. Both for the positive and negative aspects that it portrays about this saga.

It tells us things about the candidate to know he had a brush with the law and how he handled it and himself during the process. It is a story that should have been out there, but Yaede handled it the wrong way.

That blog her campaign manager was running was pure propaganda. It was presented as a news website, but had all the tell-tale signs of being shady: no authors or contact information, no advertising, no subjects beside the Hamilton election, no critical coverage of the incumbent mayor, in fact, no words about Yaede that were not glowing praise.

Then there was the troubling aspect that team Yaede insisted that they knew nothing about who was posting that “independent news site,” as they called it. Repeatedly. Yaede and Scharfenberger both on the record with reporters at The Trentonian denying having anything to do with the blog, yet speaking highly of the content and sharing every post through Yaede’s Facebook pages. Also interesting, an investigation by an online sleuth friendly with The Trentonian showed that social media links to that blog’s posts were almost entirely just Yaede and her inner circle, Yaede herself pushing out links to the “stories” minutes after they posted to the blog in many cases.

So there was little doubt to anyone watching closely, or even casually, that Yaede’s team was behind that blog, but we lacked proof until prosecutors connected the dots and put the proof out there. Yaede’s own defense on the criminal charge involved never denying authorship of the blog, but claiming that the expunged records were okay to publish.

Now the question needs to be asked, if you knew it was legal and right for you to publish that information, why go through this underhanded deceit of an actual fake news website that was really campaign releases thinly masquerading as something else.

Seems like there should be questions asked as to how that violates election laws. These might be more minor fines, but voters should demand better from our leaders, and from the bodies that provide oversight for elections. Sounds like time for Murphy’s people to actually step in like Yaede claims they’ve been doing all along.

There is a state Election Commission that should be looking into this news blog and lots of other oddities that seem to swirl around Hamilton politics.