And you guys thought it ended with Spitzer. It’s beginning to look like Paterson might be caught in in a sex scandal of his own, not by sleeping with prossies, but by using campaign funds to finance trysts with “campaign members”:
Mr. Paterson…has struggled to answer questions about whether he improperly used campaign money in the relationships he said he had with other women during a troubled time in his marriage.
He has given conflicting accounts, alternately denying and then saying it was possible that he inadvertently used his campaign credit card for personal expenses. He stressed that if he had used the card for personal expenses, he would have repaid the committee.
Mr. Berger also provided a new explanation for a $500 campaign payment to a state employee with whom Mr. Paterson had an affair, one that conflicted with the version of events that the governor offered earlier in the week. In his recollection of the payment, Mr. Paterson had said that it was made to reimburse her for a contribution she made on his behalf to the 2002 gubernatorial campaign of H. Carl McCall, a Democratic former state comptroller.
Such an expenditure would have been illegal, since campaign contributors cannot be reimbursed by someone else, and state election records showed no donation from the woman to Mr. McCall. On Friday, Mr. Berger said that Mr. Paterson’s recollection was wrong, and that the $500 was actually payment for her work updating the campaign committee’s donor database.
Oh yeah, the lefty line on this one is if you question Paterson’s, er, associations with his female staffers you’re being sexist. Sexist will be the new racist.
