ALBANY – The state Ethics Commission is secretly battling Gov. Spitzer and his aides over access to potentially explosive private e-mails linked to the dirty-tricks scandal, including messages from the governor himself.
The battle raged all last week even as Spitzer publicly claimed he was fully cooperating with the commission probe, sources said yesterday.
At one point, aides to the governor decided to “punt” the commission’s request for some of the private e-mails by forwarding them to lawyers for two of the key conspirators in the scandal, Darren Dopp, Spitzer’s just-reinstated communications director, and William Howard, his demoted homeland-security adviser, according to the sources.
“They punted the [e-mail] requests to the private lawyers rather than make the demand themselves that Dopp and Howard, who are on the state payroll and under their control, turn them over,” said a source close to the probe.
One request was signed by Spitzer’s first deputy secretary, Sean Patrick Maloney, who – in a controversial move in July – was given “special counsel” status allowing him to invoke lawyer-client privilege to avoid being interviewed about the scandal.
The imbroglio involves a plot by Spitzer aides to use the State Police to gather supposedly damaging information on Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.
Spitzer and his aides want to narrow the definition of what constitutes a scandal “record” and to deny the commission access to what they contend are “irrelevant” or “peripheral” references to the dirty-tricks plot.
The Post disclosed last month that scandal-related private e-mails sent from personal communication devices such as BlackBerrys were not provided by Spitzer’s office to investigators for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who issued a bombshell report about the embarrassing mess on July 23.
While Spitzer spokeswoman Christine Anderson insisted, “We are cooperating fully with the commission,” she repeatedly refused to deny that there is a dispute over the records.
Dopp, meanwhile, was described by Spitzer administration insiders, as “bitter” and “angry” and “convinced that he was unfairly made a scapegoat” for the scandal by the governor.
Spitzer returned Dopp to his $175,000-a-year job last week, in a move Republicans called an effort to buy the aide’s silence.