He’s up to his old tricks.
A top state Independence Party official who helped funnel $750,000 from Mayor Bloomberg to a consultant who swiped it also played middleman in a scheme to steer more than $350,000 toward attacks against Democratic candidates, a scathing new report claims.
Thomas Connolly, vice chair of the Independence Party, approved of the “misuse” of campaign housekeeping funds to help Republicans go after Democratic state senatorial candidates Terry Gipson and Joseph Addabbo during the 2012 elections, according to a Moreland Commission panel.
It’s the latest black mark for the No. 2 guy in the state’s third party.
In 2011, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. named Connolly and his party as a “noncriminal defendant’’ in the case against former GOP consultant John Haggerty, who stole Bloomberg campaign cash during the 2009 mayoral race.
Bloomberg had contributed $1.2 million to the Independence Party that year, with most of it to go to Haggerty for an Election Day poll-watching operation.
Instead, Haggerty diverted $750,000 to buy his childhood home in Queens. He was later convicted and sentenced to 1¹/₃ to 4 years in prison, a sentence he’s appealing.
Vance accused Connolly — who wasn’t charged in the case — of trying to hide evidence and cover up the misuse of Bloomberg’s money.
The DA said Connolly and Haggerty also fabricated and backdated paperwork to make it look like the Independence Party had given Haggerty a contract for the poll-watching effort
At one point, Connelly tried to conceal from the Board of Elections a transfer of the mayor’s funds to Haggerty, prosecutors said.
In the new string of allegations, Moreland investigators detailed a setup in which the GOP transferred more than $350,000 from its own campaign housekeeping account to that of the Independence Party’s housekeeping account — and then Connolly and his operatives used the dough to pay for ads attacking Gipson and Addabbo.
Both candidates won their races.
Housekeeping funds are supposed to be used solely for party-building administrative costs.
In one e-mail, Scott Stevens, operations director for the Senate Republicans’ housekeeping account, sent Connolly a GOP attack mailer that depicted Addabbo as Dracula, and asked that it be paid through the Independence Party.
“Absolutely OK to go with us,” Connolly said, according to the Moreland panel.
Connolly did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked about the findings, Gipson — one of the first lawmakers to pledge cooperation with the Moreland investigations — said, “It is examples like this that add to the mountain of reasons we desperately need campaign-finance and good-government reform in New York state, and one of the reasons I ran for office in the first place.”