Notes on a Scandal. Colangelo Flack Griffin: It’s Not Real News, It’s Opinion.
It is a curious workplace in which people take so many detailed notes of their daily encounters with one another. The Office of the Chief State’s Attorney turns out to be such a place. One office Boswell recorded the reactions in the top tier of the Division of Criminal Justice to the October 1st Hartford Courant column breaking the tawdry tale of a hire-for-influence scandal.
The Dear Diary entry discloses the conversation in an office meeting to discuss that column about Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo’s hiring of deputy state budget director Kostantinos Diamantis’s daughter Anastasia to a $99,000 a year job of unclear responsibilities in his office. Colangelo was wounded that the raises for himself and his top colleagues that he’d been requesting for months would not be granted. An injustice, according to the handwritten notes provided to investigator Stanley Twardy.
The scrivener reveals he and a colleague say the raises do not “look right” and should be dropped. Colangelo spokesperson Alaine Griffin backed her boss, according to the notes. “Not real news, opinion……” The incident reveals how quickly former reporters and editors can lose their sense of news when they go to work for the establishment.
Or perhaps she was just joking.
On November 24th, Colangelo refers to fireworks of the day before. I had requested emails between Colangelo and Kostantinos Diamantis. “Nothing there,” according to Colangelo. That would depend on your definitions of “nothing” and “there.” A critical email revealed a frantic Colangelo telling Diamantis he needed the raises so the state’s attorneys would not oppose his approaching reappointment. That was more than nothing. That email, however, was not included in the DCJ’s response to that FOI request. It was found elsewhere. So, in the narrowest sense, there was nothing there, but it did exist.
Five months before, a colleague was “raising concerns about Anastasia’s role in grants in an email.” Colangelo, according to the notes, replied, “That job has gotten us a lot of stuff!” There’s more stuff coming, but not what Colangelo anticipated. Our diarist “will attempt to smooth it over w/Gail.” Blessed are the peacemakers, but essential are the notetakers.
Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Kostantinos Diamantis!
Governor Ned Lamont said Thursday he’d fire Colangelo if he could.
The story continues.
Published February 3, 2022.