State Inspector General Defends Spitzer Inquiry
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM
Published: August 21, 2007
ALBANY, Aug. 20 — The state’s inspector general, Kristine Hamann, defended her brief but turbulent tenure on Monday in her first detailed interview since her office became embroiled in a controversy over the Spitzer administration’s effort to use the state police to tarnish a political rival.
They have also criticized her for not referring her investigation to Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, which would have given Mr. Cuomo authority to subpoena those aides. One of those aides, Richard Baum, is Ms. Hamann’s direct supervisor.
At the direction of the governor’s counsel, Mr. Baum and Darren Dopp, the governor’s communications director, declined to speak to Mr. Cuomo’s investigators, leaving lingering questions about how much Mr. Spitzer or Mr. Baum knew about the plan. Both men have denied knowing that anything improper was being done.
Ms. Hamann asserted — both in the interview and in a letter she sent to a top Republican Senator on Monday — that she conducted her inquiry in good faith and could not have referred the matter to the attorney general because he found no evidence of illegal conduct. Mr. Cuomo, who like Mr. Spitzer is a Democrat, conducted a parallel inquiry and issued a scathing report last month that found that the governor’s staff had misused the state police and suggested disciplinary action against three officials.
Ms. Hamann concurred in Mr. Cuomo’s findings and did not issue her own report.
“When they finished the report, they said there was no criminal conduct,” Ms. Hamann said. “If they say there’s no criminal conduct, I cannot make a referral.”
Some lawmakers — including a top Democrat — disputed that assertion and an official in Mr. Cuomo’s office testified recently that Ms. Hamann could have referred the matter to the attorney general. State law appears to give department and agency heads broad discretion to refer matters to the attorney general “in relation to any matters connected” with their departments. But Ms. Hamann said her office had researched the relevant statute and concluded that it had only been used to make criminal referrals.
Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who wrote the law that created the inspector general’s office, said on Monday that the inspector general should have been able to refer the case whether or not Mr. Cuomo had concluded there was criminal conduct.
“I’m not sure why she’s taking the position she’s taking,” he said. “Specific authority is given to her to determine the need for further investigation by another state agency.
“If she wanted the attorney general’s help in a further investigation, she had the authority to get that done,” he added.
Ms. Hamann began her investigation at Mr. Spitzer’s request, but then quietly suspended it when she learned that Mr. Baum might have been involved. Republicans have criticized her for not publicly acknowledging that her investigation had been suspended until one of her aides disclosed the fact during a Senate hearing this month.
But Ms. Hamann said she had taken her investigation as far as she could. “We did what we thought was right at the time and articulated what I thought was true, which is that we were done,” she said.
Pressed on whether she should have said from the beginning that her investigation was a limited one, she said, “The attorney general took the lead, they issued this report, and they asked me to join in it, and I did, and they had completed their investigation and I knew I was done.”
Ms. Hamann said she determined that she had a conflict of interest related to Mr. Baum shortly before reading the Cuomo report, but had already determined on her own that there had been no criminal wrongdoing. Ms. Hamann, however, did not interview key aides to the governor involved in the case, including Mr. Baum and Mr. Dopp.
The matter has raised new questions about the effectiveness of the inspector general’s office, which was created to police the executive branch and its myriad agencies. Critics of the office say it is too beholden to the governor to conduct independent investigations, and Senate Republicans said on Monday that they planned to introduce legislation to compel the inspector general to refer investigations to the attorney general when there are conflicts.
They also threatened to issue a subpoena to compel Ms. Hamann’s testimony at a hearing early next month.
“What we need to do, once and for all, is to remove the suspicion, get concrete answers to all the questions and clear the air,” Senator George H. Winner Jr., chairman of the Senate Investigations and Government Operations Committee, who is a sponsor of the proposed new legislation, said in a statement.
In the interview, Ms. Hamann would not commit herself to appear voluntarily before the committee and rejected a call from the Senate to refer an unrelated investigation of a former Spitzer aide to the attorney general.
“In almost every case, you can argue a conflict,” she said of her job. “An inspector general’s office is within the organization, so normal analyses of conflict can’t really apply here because you are necessarily within the organization. But if you say that an organization doesn’t have the right to police itself, how can an organization really try and move forward?”
Ms. Hamann, 55, first met the governor in the 1980s, when she was a more senior prosecutor in the division of the Manhattan district attorney’s office where he then worked. She served as co-chairwoman of one of the governor’s transition committees — one exploring criminal justice policy issues — after his election last November.
Inspectors general have been low-profile figures in Albany, charged with exposing corruption at state agencies and public authorities. Ms. Hamann called her situation unprecedented, having presided over an investigation that led to questions about her direct supervisor.
“As far as I knew, this had never happened before,” she said. “There was no road map.” |
