The ongoing scandal at the state Capitol involving charges the Spitzer administration used the State Police to gather information to help smear a political rival of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, has caused finger-pointing in many directions.
Some papers have been accused of being on Spitzer's side, others for siding with Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, the target of the monitoring.
When Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued his damaging report in July, the Times Union of Albany became a target because it received the State Police information that Spitzer aides were intent on using to deliver a political - and maybe more - blow to Bruno.
Since then, Senate Republicans have been more direct claiming the Times Union was actually part of a scheme with the Spitzer administration to embarrass the Legislature's top Republican, something the paper has denied in defending its original July 1 story.
So it was curious this week to read the Sunday' Times Union, which reported an "exclusive" story on how the Republican Pataki administration kept information about Bruno's use of state aircraft. The newspaper relied on a Freedom of Information request filed earlier in the week with the State Police.
It was curious because The Buffalo News submitted a FOIL for the same information - more
than a week earlier. But The News didn't get the package of documents until after the Times Union story ran.
The whole matter was hardly exclusive to anyone.
Information that the State Police kept records of Bruno's flights was a rather obvious footnote - No. 10 on page 16 - of a recent report on the whole affair by the Albany County district attorney.
The Buffalo News, relying on the district attorney's report, put in its FOIL request on Sept. 25, seeking all of Bruno's travel documents from 2004-2006. The News also requested that it be called when the documents were ready, and it would be pick up the documents from the State Police offices.
A week later, the Times Union requested the same information.
The Times Union, according to its Sunday story, obtained the documents on Friday, Oct. 5.
The following Monday, after the Times Union story ran, The Buffalo News' FOIL request was found on the desk of a secretary in the press room of the Capitol. No postage or date of delivery on it, the package had been routed through a state mail system.
When the package actually was delivered is unclear, though it wasn't in the batch of mail examined Friday in the press room.
The State Police says it followed all the proper procedures for mailing. The date of the response from the agency was listed as Oct. 1. Still, the Times Union was confident enough to label its Sunday story "exclusive."
Cuomo's office has sharply criticized The Times Union's Sunday article because it claimed the new documents of Bruno's travels during the Pataki years raise doubts about Cuomo's findings that the State Police actions this year regarding Bruno's travel were out of the ordinary.
Lawyers for Cuomo, in a detailed letter to the Times Union, noted that the more recent efforts by the State Police under Spitzer was unusual because, in part, they re-created documents that never existed so they could be released to a newspaper.
"While we understand the Times Union's unique interest and involvement in this matter, it is important to us as investigators to keep the factual record clear," the two attorneys said in a letter posted earlier this week by the New York Daily News.
-- Tom Precious
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