How much contempt can a progressive party show for ideals it claims to support?
Judging from the circus inside a courtroom orchestrated Monday by the Working Families Party, the answer is plenty.
In this Staten Island courtroom, two operatives from the WFP-endorsed 2009 campaign of Debi Rose were charged with grand larceny. The city councilwoman was herself deemed an unindicted co-conspirator by Special Prosecutor Roger Adler.
WFP supporters jeered the charges and called the accusations a “witch hunt.” The same phrase was used at a City Hall press conference by more than a dozen of Rose’s fellow council members.
Truth is, far from a “witch-hunt,” this indictment is the result of a probe that began with a Post exposé into how the WFP’s for-profit arm, Data and Field Services, did an end-run around campaign-finance law by giving sweetheart discounts to WFP-endorsed candidates such as Rose.
This arrangement allowed WFP-endorsed candidates to escape the spending limits others had to observe.
In an earlier lawsuit brought by Staten Island voters, a state Supreme Court justice already found the deal illegal, ordered DFS shut down and cited the WFP for contempt.
In the progressive canon, there are few causes more sacred than New York City’s limits on campaign spending, which liberals want to impose statewide. So you might think a criminal conspiracy to get around those laws would come in for particular denunciation.
But at the WFP we see the latest expression of the new progressive code in New York: Rules are for other people.
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