In his first public apperarance since announcing that he intends to step down when his term ends, Gov. Paterson distanced himself from former top aide David Johnson by claiming he’s not involved in the “problems of someone who worked for us.”
Johnson is at the center of an investigation into why state troopers visited his longtime girlfriend after she filed a domestic violence complaint against him last Halloween.
Even though Paterson has admitted speaking to the woman in the case — which is certain to come up in the investigation — he insisted that’s not why he decided to pull the plug on his uphill election campaign.
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“This is a separate issue that really involves the problems of someone that worked for us and not me,” Paterson said at a midtown breakfast forum sponsored by former City Council members Ken Fisher and Walter McCaffrey and attended by a couple hundred business leaders.
The governor claimed he’s the victim of a “hysteria” that has no basis in fact.
“Going back over a month there have been hideous and unsubstantiated rumors where I’ve had to read what the speculation would be about, what the actual stories would actually be,” he said.
“None of those stories, speculations, came to fruition.”
He declined to answer questions about the domestic violence incident, citing the investigation.