Republican front runner Tom Foley said Sunday that his two opponents in the race for governor are "desperate'' by sharply attacking his record with only one month left to the August 10 primary.
Foley was responding to particularly harsh criticisms by Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele and longtime business executive Oz Griebel over Foley's tenure as a civilian administrator in Iraq and his two arrests in incidents in 1989 and 1993 in which criminal charges were eventually dropped.
The clash came one day before Foley will go to Hartford Superior Court in his attempt to block Fedele from receiving more than $2.1 million in public financing for his campaign. Foley charges that Fedele and the State Elections Enforcement Commission have both misinterpreted the state's campaign finance law, saying that Fedele does not qualify for any money under the law. The lawsuit has prompted a bitter clash as Fedele needs the money in order to compete with the millions of dollars that Foley has poured into his own campaign. Fedele needs to begin television advertising soon in order to close the gap of more than 25 percentage points in the polls behind Foley before the August 10 primary.
The latest dust-up on Sunday was prompted by an article in the Connecticut Post newspaper about Foley's seven-month tenure in Iraq during the Bush administration and whether he was in physical danger there. Foley, a business executive with an M.B.A. from Harvard who was hired for the job by the Pentagon, was involved in privatizing businesses that had been taken over by the Iraqi government under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Foley said in an interview Sunday that the article itself was accurate, but a 2006 book that was mentioned in the article was "fiction'' and "highly inaccurate'' because Foley was quoted in the book without ever having spoken to the author. As such, Foley says the quotes are "hearsay'' and came from an unknown third party because the author never heard them from Foley.
One of the disputes is over whether Foley was "dodging rockets and mortars'' as mentioned in his campaign web site. He later was quoted in a speech after his tenure as saying that he was able to walk "up and down the streets'' in Baghdad.
"Like Richard Blumenthal's war record exaggerations, Tom Foley's false claims about his time as a civilian administrator in Iraq are an insult to the troops and those civilians who really did incur daily life-threatening risks," said Fedele's spokesman, Christopher Cooper. "Whether its exaggerating the facts about his time in Iraq, or grossly distorting his business record, Foley has shown a deeply troubling pattern of misrepresenting the facts about his life and career. That is why it is so important that he cooperate with the full release of all records related to his two arrests and imprisonment, and allegations that he evaded taxes. Given his pattern of serial distortion, short of full disclosure, voters and the media should regard his claims in these matters with a high degree of skepticism."
In a similar statement on Sunday, Griebel said, "The significant discrepancies between Tom's characterizations of his arrests, leveraged buyout business deals, and, now, his time in Iraq, reveals a troubling pattern of misrepresenting facts for political gain. The continual evolution and exaggeration of Tom's ambitions and resume raise serious questions about his judgment, temperament and ability to win.''
Foley, though, dismissed the views of both opponents.
"This is what happens when people are 27 points behind in a campaign with four weeks to go,'' Foley said.