A court battle may be brewing over the release of the videotape and transcript of Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz’s sworn testimony in a deposition Wednesday.
Judge Michael Sheldon has scheduled a hearing Tuesday in Superior Court in Hartford on whether five hours’ worth of unusual, videotaped testimony by a top state official will be made public.
As Sheldon makes it increasingly clear that he wants to keep the case from being tried in the media, only a few glimpses are emerging of issues being argued behind closed doors. Here’s one such glimpse: According to a document filed in court, Bysiewicz is the subject of an “ethics complaint … filed by a constituent.” Lawyers would not discuss it.
Bysiewicz, a Democrat, has brought the lawsuit in hopes that Sheldon will declare her eligible to run for attorney general under a state statute that requires the holder of that office to have logged 10 years in the “active practice” of law in Connecticut.
If that statute isn’t declared unconstitutional – which Bysiewicz hopes it will be, via her lawsuit – then she needs the judge to rule that her 11 years as secretary of the state, an office for which you don’t need to be a lawyer, count as the “active practice” of law. She was in private and corporate legal practice for only six years before assuming her current office.
The Courant Thursday filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the office of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for a written transcript of Wednesday’s deposition and a copy of the video. The office has received a copy of the videotape, as a legal participant in Bysiewicz’s lawsuit.
Blumenthal said Thursday night in an interview that after receiving the Courant’s FOI request, “we alerted the court … and indicated that we were prepared to release the tapes in response to the request.” But Sheldon then “ordered that the tapes be withheld from disclosure and the status quo be preserved until there is a hearing,” Blumenthal said.
Even though the scheduled trial in the case is nearly two weeks off, it already has attracted intense interest from the news media and politicians. Now this new, looming issue over the disclosure or sealing of the videotaped deposition increases its explosive potential.
A deposition is a pre-trial proceeding at which a witness – in this case Bysiewicz, who is also the plaintiff – is questioned under oath by a lawyer who is gathering information in preparation for an eventual trial. On Wednesday, it was lawyer Eliot Gersten, representing the state Republican Party, asking her the questions in the all-day deposition that’s scheduled to resume at Gersten’s Hartford office on Monday.
Both Gersten and Bysiewicz’s lawyer, Wesley W. Horton of Hartford, begged off Thursday and Friday when asked for details, citing Sheldon’s concerns about publicity.
There was a brief post-deposition skirmish in court on Thursday, when Gersten filed a motion to compel disclosure of documents that Bysiewicz apparently had mentioned during Wednesday’s questioning. His request included “any and all documents related to an ethics complaint filed against [Bysiewicz] by a constituent” concerning “similar subject matter” to Bysiewicz’s claims in her lawsuit. Gersten didn’t elaborate, but he did say he hadn’t gotten everything he was looking for.
Bysiewicz is seeking the Democratic nomination to the office that Blumenthal is vacating to run for the U.S. Senate. She had originally set her sights on the party’s gubernatorial nomination, but switched in mid-January to a candidacy for attorney general. Although polls show her as the early front-runner, her effort has been marred by questions of whether she is eligible to run – as well as her highly public and so-far unsuccessful efforts to erase those questions.
There also have been disclosures that her office has maintained a “constituent database” of 36,000 names including details about their political leanings and personal characteristics. Blumenthal’s office is investigating a citizen’s complaint that she has used public resources for political purposes with the database, which she denies.