It was a day of contentious exchanges at Hartford Superior Court Tuesday over whether the State Elections Enforcement Commission can subpoena materials from Connecticut Democratic Party which it believes illegally paid for campaign materials last year.
The subpoenas seek more information about the creation and distribution of a mailer featuring then-gubernatorial candidate Dannel Malloy. A Republican complaint alleges the mailer was illegally funded with federal monies; Democrats say the use of federal funds was warranted because the mailer was a get-out-the-vote effort, rather than the promotion of a single candidate.
Michael Mandell, the executive director of the Connecticut Democratic Party was on the stand for much of the day, giving detailed testimony about the nature of mailers used in the campaign. “We paid for the mailers out of a federal account because we were required to do so,” he argued. “There was language on here… that triggered federal election activity, for instance the hours that polls were open, a number for rides, the date and time of the election, and then the exhortation to vote.”
Much of the afternoon was taken up with back-and-forth between the two sides on the exact nature of different types of election materials issued by the party.
But Judge Antonio Robaina seemed to get frustrated with the lengthy questioning, saying he felt it did not add useful information about the narrow question at issue before the court, which concerns only the right to subpoena.
He said he would rather have heard arguments from lawyers on both sides. “I don’t want to torture the process,” he said from the bench. “But here’s the simple fact. Some of the subpoena’s appropriate, some of it is over-broad. Everybody in this room knows that - I'm not saying anything outrageous. And we can probably all identify and agree to 98 percent of which is appropriate and which is not.”
But he did not get to rule. At the end of the day counsel for the Democrats, David Golub, asked for more time to formulate his closing argument, and the case was continued until December 1st.
