The Hartford Courant's Jon Lender has unveiled documents obtained by the paper about prospective gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley's 1981 traffic incident that landed him in a police cell for a night. The charges were dropped.
In 2010 interviews during his first run for governor, Foley called the incident "minor," but according to Lender's story:
The driver of the other car – Michael Howe, now of Greenwich – told The Courant in a recent interview that he believed the contact between the vehicles had been "no accident," and that the episode had been "frightening."
This incident, along with another in 1993 involving his ex-wife, came back into question after Foley leveled a series of charges against Gov. Dannel Malloy while announcing an exploratory committee for another run for governor. State Democrats asked for Foley to release more information about the arrests. As he told me on WNPR's Where We Live in September, these allegations had already been "vetted by The Hartford Courant" in 2010.
"Whatever public records exist about this are out there for people to look at," Foley told me. "Nothing is sealed. I haven't requested that anything not be provided. So there are no unrevealed records."
Now, with these records revealed, Foley's rivals for the GOP nomination have an opening. Unsurprisingly, the outspoken Mayor of Danbury, Mark Boughton, who ran on the ticket with Foley in 2010, took his shot in a statement (as reported in Kevin Rennie's blog):
"The recent revelations as described in Jon Lender’s article regarding Ambassador Foley’s arrests are troubling. I would encourage Ambassador Foley to be open and honest in explaining the discrepancy’s in the various accounts of the events in question. If the Republican party is going to win in November 2014, we must have a clean and clear shot at the Governor’s office free from controversy.”
During his Where We Live appearance, Foley seems to have asked the pertinent question at this point in the 2014 race: "Do the citizens of Connecticut really care about something that happened 30 years ago? I don't think so."
We'll find out.
