Political snitches get stitches
When it comes to a judicial scandal, a Saratoga County Republican official thinks silence is golden
One person who appears to recognize that state Supreme Court law clerk Matthew R. Coseo made a gross ethical lapse by giving a roomful of Saratoga County Republicans a thinly veiled preview of his boss’ imminent decision on a closely watched absentee ballot lawsuit is Matthew R. Coseo: After the Times Union’s Brendan J. Lyons reported on Mr. Coseo’s remarks in a Feb. 12 GOP meeting as he sought the party’s nomination for an open county court judge’s seat, he dropped out of the race, quit his day job as a clerk to state Supreme Court Justice Dianne M. Freestone, and stepped down as a Wilton town justice. (The ballot lawsuit, filed by Republicans, has been reassigned to another judge.)
In an age when too few public officials take responsibility even when caught red-handed, Mr. Coseo deserves a measure of credit for tacitly acknowledging with those actions that he had crossed a clear ethical line — or at least for realizing that any attempt to remain in any of those three roles was utterly untenable.
Others took a different point of view. They include Halfmoon GOP Chairman Tom Lundquist, a member of the county party’s executive committee, who sent an email to his fellow town committee members suggesting — without offering a shred of evidence — that two other Republican aspirants in the county judge race, Adele Kurtz and Daniel Kopach, might have been involved in revealing to the public Mr. Coseo’s remarks via an audio recording of the GOP gathering. Lundquist whined that the audio had been provided to “liberal media outlets” — we can only guess who he was referring to — and called the coverage of Mr. Coseo’s remarks “slander,” a word choice that suggests he has a weak grasp of legal definitions: It’s not slander to report what someone said as memorialized in a recording.
Ms. Kurtz and Mr. Kopach, “who promised the room they would support the winner, seemingly have done the opposite,” Mr. Lundquist wrote. “I am sure their hands are not directly on it to protect them but the result is the same. … The county chair, myself and others are diligently looking for a new candidate, NOT THE OTHER TWO, to replace Matt.”
This message, boiled down, was that alleged political snitches get stitches. One wonders how Mr. Lundquist would have responded if this tale of downfall had starred a Democratic candidate who made a similar ethical lapse: Would he have been sympathetic if Democratic party officials did their best to keep the scandal under wraps and sought to punish anyone suspected of bringing it to light?
Mr. Lundquist seems to be under the impression that political committees — or at least the one in which he’s ostensibly a leader — are organizations that operate under the code of silence that the cosa nostra refers to as “omerta,” and that anyone who becomes aware of wrongdoing has a duty to conceal it. While there’s certainly a lot of that sort of cracked party-above-all thinking in politics these days, Mr. Lundquist would do himself and his constituents a service if he worried less about exposure and more about maintaining standards.