US News

COLLUSION COURSE

ALBANY – Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno slammed Albany District Attorney David Soares for giving Gov. Spitzer‘s senior staffers a chance to edit pieces of his controversial report on Albany’s dirty-tricks scandal.

“This borders on a conspiracy by the district attorney and governor’s office,” Bruno (R-Rensselaer) said of the disclosure first reported in yesterday’s Post.

Soares was looking into an alleged plot by Spitzer staffers to discredit the majority leader.

“If true, the DA’s office has a lot of explaining to do. This would be worse than a whitewash,” charged Bruno.

Bruno said the Ethics Commission should place Spitzer and his aides under oath publicly.

Meanwhile, the state Senate Investigations Committee, in an unprecedented move, voted yesterday to subpoena acting State Police Superintendent Preston Felton and “any witness who might have information relevant” to testify in its probe of the scandal.

Felton had refused the committee’s request to testify.

Committee Chairman George Winner (R-Elmira) said there was a strong likelihood that subpoenas would also be issued for Richard Baum, Spitzer’s chief-of-staff, and the governor’s communications director, Darren Dopp. Both men refused to testify under oath during an investigation of the scandal by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

The vote, by the Republican-controlled committee, came after an at-times contentious hearing at which Glenn Valle, the State Police’s chief counsel, insisted that neither Felton nor any other State Police official acted improperly as they gathered and created documents aimed at proving that Bruno was improperly using state aircraft for political purposes.

Valle claimed that the records prepared by the State Police and given to the Albany Times-Union in late June were normal records subject to public disclosure – a contention rejected by Felton during testimony to investigators for Cuomo and Soares, who issued a report on the scandal Friday.

Republican senators repeatedly cited a July 23 report from Cuomo, like Spitzer a Democrat, that found that Felton and other State Police officials, at the direction of top aides to the governor, conspired to create records designed to damage Bruno.

Cuomo’s report concluded that Bruno had done nothing wrong.

Felton had no immediate comment.

fredric.dicker@nypost.com