Lawyers for Council candidate Debi Rose resisted a motion to
provide campaign finance records in a pre-hearing Thursday with the appellate division about
the lawsuit against Rose and Data & Field Services (DFS) on the grounds
that doing so would violate their Fifth Amendment rights against
self-incrimination.
At issue in the lawsuit, which was brought in Richmond County
Supreme Court by former deputy mayor Randy Mastro working pro bono on behalf of
five supposedly disenfranchised voters in Rose’s Council district, is whether
she received below market services from DFS during her primary campaign. Rose,
the suit contends, received massive in-kind contributions from DFS as a benefit
of being supported by the Working Families Party.
The Campaign Finance Board declared DFS an arm of the Party in
early September, following a series of City Hall articles examining the company
and its connections.
The claim from Rose’s campaign was made in appellate court in
Brooklyn on Thursday. Lawrence Mandelker, a lawyer representing DFS, said even
he had been surprised to hear it.
As was suggested in court, advancing the Fifth Amendment argument could be taken as a sign
that the Rose campaign has reason to believe some laws may have been violated
in its filings with the Campaign Finance Board (CFB).
Lawyers for Rose and DFS at first asked Judge Anthony Giacobbe to
dismiss the suit, with Mandelker saying that all proceedings should be held off
until after the last filing arrives at the CFB from Rose, which he said would be 20
days after Election Day on Tuesday. (In fact, the last filing is due Jan. 15.) He repeatedly made the case that the court
should leave any investigation to authorities already charged with policing the
city’s campaign finance system.
“This whole thing is going to be duked out—assuming there is
anything to duke out—in front of the Campaign Finance Board,” Mandelker said.
“What is it they’re going to get from this court that they’re not going to get
from an administrative body tasked to do this?”
Representatives from the city Board of Elections and Campaign
Finance Board were on hand to observe the proceedings. The CFB performs its own
audits of all campaigns over the 14 months following each election.
Judge Giacobbe did not dismiss the suit. He asked those bringing the suit
to post $2,500 to cover court costs by Monday and to present their discovery
demands--requests for records and other documentation--on Wednesday, Nov. 4, to
be answered by DFS and the Rose campaign by Nov. 11. The next court date to
review all these and present additional motions has been preliminarily
scheduled for Nov. 16.
Giacobbe also dismissed a request from the lawyers for DFS and
Rose to respond in tandem to the requests for documents, based on the argument
that this could result in both being asked to provide duplicate documents.
Mastro had argued that since one of the main issues in the suit is whether
accurate records were kept, there was an imperative to seeing what each
produced.
As the proceedings ended, Mastro—who used the word “extraordinary”
several times in and out of the courtroom to describe the surprise Fifth
Amendment reference from the Rose campaign—thanked Giacobbe for letting the
suit go forward.
“It’s a very important case, your honor,” Mastro said.
Giacobbe was nonplussed.
“Every case in here is very important,” he responded.