Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 16, 1993 TAG: 9311160072
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: NEWARK, N.J. LENGTH: Medium
Democrats filed suit last week asking to question Rollins about his comments to reporters in the days after Whitman's victory on Nov. 2. A day later, Rollins retracted his comments, and Whitman flatly denied Rollins' boasts.
U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise declined a request by the Democrats to link the investigation to a previous court order involving intimidation tactics used by the state Republicans in the 1981 gubernatorial election.
Both the state attorney general's office and the U.S. attorney in Newark last week announced separate plans to investigate Rollins's remarks, with the federal investigation looking at possible federal criminal violations and the state looking into possible civil violations of state voting laws.
Debevoise agreed with the attorney for the Democrats, Theodore Wells, that their suit was sufficiently different from the two government investigations to justify permitting the Democrats to question Rollins. He also granted them permission to question Whitman's brother, Webster Todd, who was Rollins's predecessor as campaign manager, and John Carbone, an attorney for the Republican state committee.
"We're trying to get to the bottom of this," said Raymond Lesniak, chairman of the state Democratic Committee, outside the courtroom.
"We know it happened. Rollins didn't dream this up out of the clear blue sky. . . . We don't have evidence that we are ready to present to the court. We have leads and indications that we believe will lead to evidence," Lesniak added.
Rollins was represented at the hearing by his attorney, who spoke only to request that the Rollins deposition, when it happens, be conducted in Washington.
The hearing followed a weekend in which the Republicans stepped up their campaign to discredit Rollins and overcome the damage caused by his comments. Whitman and her husband, John, went, in her words, "to pray" at two black churches Sunday.
On Saturday, both the Whitman campaign and the Republican state committee released their election expenses filings, showing their total expenditures on Election Day to be substantially less than Rollins had claimed.
The party and campaign records show a total of $48,000, largely in payments of less than $100 to individual campaign workers.
Democrats spent much more. For example, in Essex County, which includes the predominately black city of Newark, the records show that the Republican party spent $2,200, whereas the Democrats spent $75,000 in "street money."
"I'm more interested in what they did not release than what they did," Lesniak said of the Republicans' disclosures.
An analysis of several key urban voting districts published by the Bergen Record on Sunday did not back up Rollins's claim that the campaign had suppressed black turnout.
Compared to 1989, when Democratic Gov. Jim Florio was elected, turnout was roughly the same in Newark, New Brunswick and Trenton and was up 3.2 percent in Paterson and 4.9 percent in Jersey City.
Voter registration in those five areas, however, dropped from 307,983 in 1989 to 274,412 this year.
by CNB