The prosecution says Foley and Rowland both understood they were going to engage in an illegal scheme to hide campaign payments.
The attorney for former Governor John Rowland took aim at his chief accuser in court Tuesday morning, trying to establish the idea that Rowland was unaware of any scheme to hide payment for his campaign work.
Brian Foley took the stand for the second day Tuesday. He owns a nursing home business called Apple Health Care, Inc. His wife , Lisa Wilson-Foley, was also a 2012 Republican congressional candidate.
“Did you ever say, ‘You know, this is all a sham, a joke....this is all subterfuge?” Weingarten asked. That is, did Foley ever tell Rowland that he was paying him to work for Apple – but that the payments were really for campaign work?
“I never said those words to Mr. Rowland or to anyone at any time,” Foley said.
“And to be perfectly clear,” Weingarten asked, “it was your idea...to ask Mr. Rowland to work for Apple?”
“It was my idea, yes,” Foley responded.
Rowland, a convicted felon who was driven from office because of a corruption scandal, is charged with hiding income to work on the campaign by masking it as a payment from Foley’s company. Rowland has pleaded not guilty. Foley has already pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, and is cooperating with federal prosecutors.
In his cross examination, Weingarten turned to an email in which Rowland told Foley, “I get it.” The prosecution has tried to establish that Foley and Rowland both understood that statement to mean that they were going to engage in an illegal scheme to hide campaign payments.
Weingarten tried to establish that other possibilities existed, and that Foley couldn’t know what Rowland actually meant.
Foley recalled a phone call with the former governor in which Rowland asked for a $10,000 bonus if Lisa Wilson-Foley were to win the Republican convention.
"My reaction was that was like a red flag," Foley said. "And I said, I got a buzz on the phone. I can't hear you. I got static. Which he chuckled to."
“No,” Foley said, “but based on his actions, and what I saw him do after the conversations, I think he did have an understanding.”
“Isn’t it also a possibility that, when he said, ‘I get it,’ he could ‘get’ that he’s too controversial to work on Lisa’s campaign?” Weingarten asked. “He wanted to do everything he could do to help Lisa win her election?”
“Is it possible?” Foley responded. “Anything’s possible.”
Weingarten asked, “Just to be clear: You never, ever, in the two years following this initial conversation... used quid pro quo language, or your term, smoking gun language, with Mr. Rowland in conversations you had with him; correct?”
“That’s correct,” Foley said.
“Never an explicit conversation with Mr. Rowland... where you said, ‘Thanks for this arrangement. Thanks for working for the campaign while I’m paying you at Apple?'” Weingarten asked.
Foley agreed. He never mentioned it, he said, because he wanted to keep it “clean.”
“If there was anything in this case it was an unspoken understanding; correct?” Weingarten asked.
“I agree,” Foley said. “Yes.”
Before the jury adjourned for lunch, Weingarten got to another important question: was Brian Foley simply trying to get the best deal he can by cooperating with prosecutors and aiming for Rowland, the biggest fish around?
Weingarten also got Foley to admit that hiring Rowland for Apple could actually be of some benefit to the company.
There was “some value for Mr. Rowland working at Apple?” Weingarten asked.
“That was not the primary purpose,” Foley responded. “But I did see there would be some value.... The hiring of Mr. Rowland was primarily for him to help with Lisa’s campaign.”
Foley also recalled a phone call with the former governor in which Rowland asked for a $10,000 bonus if Lisa Wilson-Foley were to win the Republican convention.
“My reaction was that was like a red flag,” Foley said. “And I said, 'I got a buzz on the phone. I can’t hear you. I got static.' Which he chuckled to.”
They didn’t speak of the bonus again.
Foley told jurors that he hadn’t told prosecutors of the $500,000 contribution to his wife’s campaign until he mentioned it on the stand on Monday.
This is also the second day in which the name of Tom Ritter came up. Ritter is a Democratic lobbyist and former state house speaker. Rowland suggested that Foley hire Ritter to help him with his nursing home business.
They ended up negotiating a $25,000 lobbying agreement, Foley said. That was proof, Weingarten said, that Rowland was doing real work.
“Was this a sham? Was it a cover-up?” Weingarten asked.
“I think it goes back to: I would not have hired Mr. Rowland if I didn’t feel it would be primarily beneficial to the campaign,” Foley said.
“Did you consider this of value to you?” Weingarten asked.
“I did,” Foley said.
Foley then agreed with Rowland that Rowland did substantive work for his business, Apple.
“The answer to your question is: yes,” Foley said. “It’s real work.”
Weingarten then spent more time documenting various scenarios in which Rowland did what Foley agreed was “real work.”
Another Foley also came up Tuesday: Tom Foley, the Republican candidate for governor.
“He’s not you, and he’s not related to you,” Weingarten said. “Fair?”
“Fair,” Foley responded.
Before the jury adjourned for lunch, Weingarten then got to another important question: was Brian Foley simply trying to get the best deal he can by cooperating with prosecutors and aiming for Rowland, the biggest fish around?
"You’re going to go before a sentencing judge and the prosecutors will make their recommendation," Weingarten said. "Subjectively, inside, do you believe you’ll get a better recommendation from the prosecutors" if Rowland is "convicted or acquitted?"
“I think it will be the same,” Foley said. “I believe that my deal with them is to tell the truth.... That’s from my heart.”
Without a deal, Foley could face many years in prison. With a deal, he could face no more than one year, and only he and his wife are charged.
Apparently, Foley liked the deal so much that he boasted about it to his employees -- at least, that’s how Weingarten characterized it. He asked Foley whether he told his staff that his punishment was akin to one for “pulling a lobster from a lobster pot while running through a stop sign.”
Foley conceded that he had said that, but said his purpose was simply to diminish the effect of the case on his company. He said it has already had a “multi-million dollar effect.”
Later in the day, Chris Covucci was called to the stand. He was a campaign operative who worked for Tom Foley’s gubernatorial campaign in 2010, and then for Lisa Wilson-Foley’s campaign as its manager.
Covucci recalled a lunch meeting on his first day on the job with Wilson-Foley. At that meeting, she told him that Rowland would be getting more involved in the campaign as he was getting paid by Apple, her husband’s business.
Wilson-Foley told Covucci, he said, that she wouldn’t have to report his work to the Federal Elections Commission. She also said it was “convenient.”
“She meant that the contract with Apple was a cover or actually paying him for working for the campaign,” Covucci said, but “there actually was work at Apple for him.”
Covucci said the Rowland arrangement caused him some concern -- enough that he told his parents and his then-girlfriend, and he even started looking for a new job.
As the campaign intensified, Rowland took an increasingly active role, getting sign-off authority on all of the campaign’s press releases.
Covucci eventually left the campaign just over a month after he started, in part, he said, because his role as campaign manager was being eclipsed by that of Rowland.
“You’ve been in campaigns before, right?” prosecutor Christopher Mattei asked Covucci, who said he had.
“Had you ever answered to a volunteer before?” Mattei asked.
“No,” Covucci said.
“Had you ever taken direction from a volunteer?”
“No,” Covucci said.
Covucci will continue his testimony on Wednesday.
