The trial of former state treasurer Timothy Cahill and his chief of staff Scott Campbell for using Lottery funds for political purposes began yesterday with a novel, if not humbling, defense: Campbell’s lawyer told jurors no one could possibly see the Lottery ads as helping Cahill’s run for governor because Cahill’s quixotic third-party run for governor was dead in the water and going nowhere. “That campaign was dead,” Campbell attorney Charles Rankin told the jury. “The idea this was a campaign ad is laughable.”
According to state prosecutors, Cahill and Campbell raided $1.8 million of the lottery’s $2 million ad budget to prop up the former treasurer’s faltering bid for the Corner Office. Cahill has said the ads, which argued that the state Lottery was astoundingly well-run and which did not mention him by name, were only aimed at encouraging Lottery sales. But Attorney General Martha Coakley has said that, as late as the summer of 2010, the Lottery had no plans to run a fall ad blitz. When she indicted Cahill this past spring, Coakley said the Lottery had been saving up its ad budget for a big holiday campaign, until Cahill campaign operatives began laying plans for an election-season ad blitz.
The attorney general also alleged that the ad content came from the Cahill campaign, and that Cahill political aides were discussing the size, timing and content of the supposedly non-political ad campaign.
Cahill’s attorney, Brad Bailey, said yesterday that Cahill approved the Lottery ad buy “not as candidate Cahill, but as Treasurer Cahill,” and he argued that “there is no evidence whatsoever our client acted with fraudulent intent.”
CommonWealth previously reported that the criminal case against Cahill is largely self-inflicted: The meat of the state’s case against the former treasurer was released during a 2010 lawsuit Cahill brought against his former gubernatorial campaign aides. By the recent standards of Beacon Hill corruption, the case against Cahill is a relative snoozer. Sal DiMasi sold out the House Speaker’s office for hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks for himself and a lobbyist friend. Former state senator Dianne Wilkerson dashed out of her State House office to take cash-stuffed envelopes from undercover FBI agents. All Cahill did, allegedly, was divert state funds to prop up a failing run for governor. And this, too, was brought down on Beacon Hill by Beacon Hill: Until 2009, the crimes Cahill is defending himself against were simple civil violations. Lawmakers elevated them to criminal offenses after DiMasi and Wilkerson had their run-ins with the feds. So Cahill and Campbell can no longer argue that they’re on trial for small change, which they might be; they’ve been reduced instead to arguing that Cahill’s Lottery ads couldn’t have improper political intent, because the Cahill for governor campaign was a joke.
–PAUL MCMORROW
BEACON HILL
The state inspector general, Glenn Cunha, will take over the investigation of the state drug lab scandal from Attorney General Martha Coakley following complaints from the Massachusetts Bar Association and the ACLU that it was improper for Coakley to oversee the probe while prosecuting former state chemist Annie Dookhan.
Gov. Deval Patrick endorses early voting for Massachusetts.
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
Secretary of State William Galvin is investigating an election official in Lawrence for faking names on nominating petitions, but Mayor William Lantigua wants to expand the official’s job and give him a $25,000 raise, the Eagle-Tribune reports.
An East Lynn Pop Warner football coach and a teenage player are suing each other in connection with an on-field incident, the Item reports.
Put Keller@Large in the curmudgeon camp of those who thought closing down an eight-block stretch of Commonwealth Ave. and suspending Green Line service through that area for an Aerosmith publicity and get-out-the-vote concert was a bad idea.
Norton teachers agree to a new contract.
NATIONAL POLITICS/WASHINGTON
U.S. News & World Report offers a detailed history of presidential pet pooches.
ELECTION 2012
President Obama and Mitt Romney tie 5 to 5 in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the first town to vote in the election. It’s up or out of public life for Romney, writes the Globe’s Glen Johnson.
After one million television commercials, and a few billion spent trying to sway a small portion of the electorate, it all comes down to this. The National Review gathers its posse to look into their crystal balls for today’s votes, with most predicting a Mitt Romney Romp led by a win in Ohio triggered by unseen forces. Such forces being unseen, Times statistician Nate Silver gives Obama an 91.6 percent chance of winning today; according to Silver, Obama has a better than 91 percent chance of winning Ohio. The American Spectator says Pennsylvania is in the bag for Romney, setting the stage for an Electoral College win, but Rupert Murdoch has totally given up on the former Massachusetts governor. Romney takes a last-minute swing through New Hampshire. Slate rounds up the country’s weirdest polling places. Eliot Spitzer criticizes both candidates for ignoring climate change and gun control.
Globe election day kumbaya package: Warren-Brown sign war between Jamaica Plain and Cambridge neighbors doesn’t intrude on their friendship. Meanwhile, some church leaders are calling for election night communions, where members can come together and put aside political differences.
New Jersey and New York will let storm-displaced citizens vote at any polling place.
Peter Gelzinis joins Joe Kennedy III on his final sprint to Election Day. Ted Kennedy, Jr. and Patrick Kennedy stump for Elizabeth Warren in Dorchester.
From the dirty tricks file: Robo-calls in Massachusetts tell people Election Day is Wednesday.
The Springfield Republican says regardless of who wins Election 2016 campaigning has already begun.
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
Downtown Boston’s Lafayette Center is getting a makeover.
CHARITY
A new analysis of grants from more than 1,400 foundations shows that multi-year grants dropped by 32 percent from 2008 to 2010.
EDUCATION
Georgia votes on charter schools today.
ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT
Coyotes discover that life is better in cities.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
The Westport highway surveyor and another town employee were charged with larceny after they allegedly set up a scam to steal town property.
The founder of a Brockton nonprofit that helps unemployed teens find jobs and training stepped down as CEO but denied criminal charges that he assaulted a woman who had been a client of the agency.
MEDIA
The New York Times is trying to make mobile apps more than containers for news stories, the Nieman Journalism Lab reports.
The public editor at the New York Times is making a splash, but is that because the newspaper is floundering a bit?