House Speaker Robert DeLeo has been on the offensive recently, and very little of it has relied on charm. DeLeo has made the rounds with television reporters. He’s battering the state judiciary’s point man on corruption inside the state Probation Department, and swiping at one-time legislative lieutenants. DeLeo’s current offensive isn’t all that different from the fights he was waging two or three years ago. He’s still surrounded by clouds from the mess in Probation. And he’s still arguing that, because he hasn’t been called a crook in court, he’s a choirboy.

DeLeo trained his fire this weekend on Paul Ware, the outside lawyer who investigated hiring fraud at Probation for the state Supreme Judicial Court. Ware’s massive report on patronage hiring at Probation served as the blueprint for the US Attorney’s successful prosecution of former Probation commissioner John O’Brien, and two of O’Brien’s former aides. After a federal jury convicted O’Brien of fraud and racketeering last week, DeLeo issued a statement saying the verdict, like Ware’s report, had cleared him of wrongdoing. Ware pushed back, telling CommonWealth that DeLeo’s statement was “a distortion.” Ware argued that his report to the SJC never cleared DeLeo of wrongdoing, nor did it ever accuse him of breaking the law, because Ware’s job was investigating Probation, not the Legislature. DeLeo responded by sending out an unusual Saturday afternoon press released in which he called Ware’s comments “disturbing and unprofessional.”

The DeLeo release quoted from a 2010 interview in which Ware said he didn’t think his report “sheds any negative light on Speaker DeLeo.” It ignored an attempt by Ware to walk that statement back.

It’s been this way ever since Ware’s report sent legislators scurrying on Beacon Hill. Ware’s report repeatedly accused O’Brien of committing fraud when he catered to legislators’ patronage requests. It threw a cloud over DeLeo, whose godson received a job at the department, and then rocketed up the Probation ranks. So DeLeo seized on Ware’s comment about no negative light landing on the Speaker. He’s repeated the line frequently, even though one of Ware’s deputies went to lengths to say the Ware report “only drew conclusions with respect to individuals in the Probation Department,” and, “while we did not find any specific evidence of wrongdoing by Rep. DeLeo, that was not our focus.”

DeLeo’s PR team hasn’t acknowledged those follow-up statements, because they’re in the same position today that they were in when the Ware report landed. They’re still fighting to shed the legacy of the things Rep. Bob DeLeo had to do to become Speaker Bob DeLeo — namely, going along to get along with Sal DiMasi.

No one has accused DeLeo of doing anything inappropriate in the Speaker’s office. But to get to the Speaker’s office, DeLeo had to play the good lieutenant to DiMasi. DiMasi used DeLeo’s Ways and Means committee to advance a raft of sketchy bills that benefitted DiMasi’s friends, from a crooked ticket scalping bill, to a crooked hand-off of Buzzard’s Bay wind farm rights, to the software contract earmark that landed DiMasi in federal prison. DeLeo wasn’t an actor in any of these instances. His committee was just the conduit these bills had to pass through before being rubber-stamped by the full House. This is the way Beacon Hill works: When the speaker rams an amendment through your committee, you usually don’t ask questions, at least in public. This kind of loyalty led DiMasi to tap DeLeo as the House’s next speaker a year and-a-half before DiMasi resigned. But it also left DeLeo stained by DiMasi’s dirty laundry.

This is the context Probation patronage operated in. DeLeo didn’t invent the Probation patronage mill. Extensive testimony in O’Brien’s trial indicated that DiMasi, Rep. Thomas Petrolati, Senate President Therese Murray, and former Senate President Robert Travaglini all played O’Brien’s patronage game with abandon. Testimony clearly tied O’Brien’s rise to DiMasi’s predecessor, former speaker Tom Finneran.

DeLeo stepped into a patronage mill Finneran and DiMasi helped engineer, and he went along with it. He helped engineer a job for his godson, and he handed out no-interview jobs to fellow lawmakers. The O’Brien jury ruled these jobs were illegal gratuities — gifts of value the lawmakers weren’t entitled to, but received because of their public offices. Now four Republican lawmakers want the House Ethics Committee, which DeLeo controls, to investigate hires DeLeo says were clean because they weren’t outright bribes.

There’s a lot of insecurity surrounding DeLeo’s response to the Probation verdict. Harvey Silverglate, a prominent defense attorney and harsh critic of the Probation verdict, told WGBH recently, “If I were Speaker DeLeo, I would not yet be breathing easy.” So DeLeo doesn’t breathe easy, and instead, he breathes fire. DeLeo lieutenants began talking up the possibility of DeLeo blowing past his self-imposed term limits. The Speaker basks in the O’Brien jury’s not-guilty findings on bribery, and ignores their findings on illegal gratuities. He loves Paul Ware when Ware says something friendly toward him, but won’t hear anything the guys says otherwise. There’s no room for gray areas, and nothing less than an absolute show of force will do.

— PAUL MCMORROW

BEACON HILL

House Speaker Robert DeLeo calls Paul Ware unprofessional for suggesting a statement Ware made in 2010 did not clear the Speaker of any wrongdoing in the Probation scandal. But DeLeo cites evidence selectively to make his case, CommonWealth reports.

Four House Republicans inquire about how to request the House Ethics Committee to investigate Speaker DeLeo. But it’s awkward because DeLeo typically requests such investigations and the State House lawyer the Republicans are consulting testified at the Probation corruption trial, the Lowell Sun reports. DeLeo gives a series of TV interviews, but doesn’t say much. DeLeo tells Broadside’s Jim Braude  that the scandal has taken a toll. And Peter Lucas likens the Probation trial to one of those in-absentia trials in the old Soviet Union.

Greater Boston examines what it would cost the state to house immigrant children crossing the border. Leaders from Boston’s minority community rally to support the plan to house immigrant children here. On immigrant children, Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone says the nation is failing a moral test.

The House chamber in the State House is getting a $20 million makeover to match the outlay earmarked for its Senate counterpart, but nobody seems to know why the renovations are needed or what the scope of the work will be on the project, which reps approved on a voice vote.

MUNICIPAL MATTERS

Revere crews begin a major cleanup effort in the wake of a rare tornado, the Item reports. Dalton also experiences damage from severe thunderstorms.

An audit of the embattled Quincy Housing Authority by an independent accounting firm finds the agency’s maintenance department cost the authority nearly $500,000 in operating losses in the last fiscal year.

CASINOS

Atlantic City’s luck runs out, Governing reports.

NATIONAL POLITICS/WASHINGTON

Virginia becomes the 18th state to have its same-sex marriage ban declared unconstitutional by the courts and the decision has prompted the North Carolina attorney general to declare he will no longer defend his state’s ban in court.

A judge strikes down Washington, DC‘s handgun ban as a violation of the Second Amendment, Time reports.

John Dean, one of the central figures in the Watergate saga and the author of a new book about the scandal, talks about Richard Nixon, who resigned 40 years ago next month.

A mural depicting President Obama as Jimi Hendrix painted on the side of a building in downtown Quincy is being removed by the owner of the club who is renovating the building and plans to cover the controversial two-year-old painting.

ELECTIONS

A Globe editorial praises Charlie Baker for releasing his tax returns, reminds us that Ted Kennedy, Mitt Romney, and Deval Patrick all set bad examples by refusing to do so, and notes approvingly that all the other major gubernatorial candidates have also released their returns or pledged to do so.

Go ahead, let the GOP talk impeachment, seems to be the Democrats’ master plan to flipping the script in the midterm elections.

The New York Times spotlights the multi-million-dollar super PAC that Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has formed to destroy super PACS. Lessig detailed his campaign finance reform agenda in a conversation with CommonWealth last year.

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

The Market Basket battle is having an impact on local farmers whose produce normally stock the supermarket’s shelves. On Greater Boston, Boston Business Journal‘s Jon Chesto and the Globe‘s Shirley Leung take a look at how long the fight can go on for both sides. Market Basket managers say they will quit if Arthur T. Demoulas is not reinstated or the firm is sold to another company, the Eagle-Tribune reports.

HEALTH CARE

An interesting battle is playing out on Beacon Hill over a bill to require insurers to pay for inpatient addiction treatment services for any patient, with business leaders, insurers, and some addiction specialists all allied in saying the legislation is pushing an outdated and often ineffective approach to opioid addiction.

TRANSPORTATION

It wasn’t quite Gilligan and company’s three-hour-tour-turned-a-lifetime, but passengers on a Boston whale watching boat did get more time at sea than they bargained for, as a  propeller on a Boston Harbor Cruises boat got tangled in a lobster trap rope Monday afternoon and the boat — and its 157 passengers — due back in Boston at about 4:30 pm, wasn’t freed and back at its dock until 8 a.m. this morning.

Commuter boat service between Hull and Boston will be suspended for at least a week next month to repair the floating dock that was damaged by a recent grounding.

ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT

State energy official Mark Sylvia says the proposed six-state solution to the region’s energy woes — charging customers regionwide for a new gas pipeline and an electricity transmission line to Canada — makes sense.

The Globe reports a heated battle on Beacon Hill over a bill to require utilities in the state to sign long-term agreements to buy lots of hydropower from Canada.

Flood insurance rates will be more reasonable under legislation signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick, but industry officials say many homes will be left under-insured, the Salem News reports.

Also being fought out in the closing days of the legislative session is a bill the Patrick administration is pushing to promote more solar power in the state.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

A national report details the increase in deaths of police officers in the line of duty but does not include a tally for the growing number of suicides among officers, which have hit a number of area departments including Brockton.

Justice Ralph Gants was sworn in Monday as the new chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court and says the state is launching a “new generation of leadership” in the courts.

MEDIA

A Pew pollster explains the shift by the New York Times to online survey panels for polling.