{"id":290129,"date":"2010-02-07T10:15:26","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T15:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogs.courant.com,2010:\/capitol_watch\/\/9.71226"},"modified":"2010-02-07T10:34:18","modified_gmt":"2010-02-07T15:34:18","slug":"bysiewicz-investigated-over-campaigns-use-of-office-database-denies-impropriety-but-adds-it-wasnt-just-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/290129","title":{"rendered":"Bysiewicz, Investigated Over Campaign’s Use Of Office Database, Denies Impropriety But Adds: ‘It Wasn’t Just Me’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, now a Democratic candidate for state attorney general, has politically exploited her office’s database of citizens’ names assembled over the course of a decade at taxpayers’ expense — by having her 2010 election committee send unsolicited e-mails to thousands of people in the database in search of political support and campaign contributions.<\/p>\n

Now Bysiewicz’s office has come under investigation by the state’s current attorney general, Richard Blumenthal. Two members of his staff are investigating a complaint by a Republican activist, who received unwanted Bysiewicz campaign e-mails and charged that she has misused “official state data” for political purposes.<\/p>\n

Bysiewicz Saturday confirmed Blumenthal is investigating her office but denied that anything improper happened. Blumenthal could not be reached for comment.<\/p>\n

You can read in depth about the situation by clicking on this link to the Sunday Courant Government Watch column<\/a>. But here are some additional comments by Bysiewicz in explaining why she had her exploratory campaign committee file a Freedom of Information Act request Feb. 2, 2009,for “an electronic copy of the Secretary of the State’s current … database.”<\/p>\n

Asked whose idea it was, she said, “I talked about it with my campaign and we decided to make the request.”<\/p>\n

So it was her idea, then?<\/p>\n

“And our campaign’s idea,” she said. “It wasn’t just me.  It was members of our campaign.”<\/p>\n

She was asked how this is different from a controversial episode in the 2006 gubernatorial election campaign. In that episode, Republican Gov. N. Jodi Rell’s chief of staff, M. Lisa Moody, had someone on her office staff copy onto a computer disk an official state list obtained from the state’s culture and tourism agency, containing the names and addresses leaders of scores of tourism and arts groups; Moody then handed it over to Rell’s campaign committee for fund-raising purposes.<\/p>\n

Bysiewicz said submitting the formal FOI request last year made a big difference. “You have a paper trail for what was done. It is a public record, it’s open and transparent. … Without a request from the campaign, then there are questions about, well, is that information from tourism being requested for a state purpose or a non-state purpose? … It was our intent to be very open, to be extremely transparent.”<\/p>\n

Bysiewicz’s office database goes back to 1999, her first year in office, and contains the names of 36,000 citizens (and nearly 9,900 e-mail addresses) who have asked her office for information or help, or otherwise had contact with it.<\/p>\n

If you contact Bysiewicz’s office with a question, or serve on some citizen committee involved with public voting issues that she supervises, you get put into the database and start getting periodic e-mail newsletters from the secretary of the state’s office about current issues.<\/p>\n

When Bysiewicz had her campaign obtain the database from the office a year ago, people in the database started getting a second e-mail newsletter — this one from her campaign committee, Friends of Susan 2010. Those newsletters contained campaign material to build up her candidacy — for governor, at the time, before she shifted her sights on the attorney general’s office in January. Some of those newsletters provided a way for people to donate to the campaign committee.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, Bysiewicz said, because the database is a public record that anyone can request — even another candidate, although none has. And, she said, both the official and campaign e-mail newsletters contain an “opt-out” provision, meaning with a simple computer-click recipients can stop receiving them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, now a Democratic candidate for state attorney general, has politically exploited her office’s database of citizens’ names assembled over the course of a decade at taxpayers’ expense — by having her 2010 election committee send unsolicited e-mails to thousands of people in the database in search of political support […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}