SIPPING CHABLIS WITH Jill Biden, it turns out, was the least of Rachael Rollins’s transgressions.
Ever since reports last summer that Rollins attended a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at an Andover home where the first lady was the headline guest, the Massachusetts US attorney has been under scrutiny for possible violation of the Hatch Act, which bars federal officials from getting involved with partisan politics or attempting to influence elections.
However, the Andover fundraiser was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to potential violations by Rollins of the federal law, according to two reports released by divisions within the Department of Justice on Wednesday.
The reports paint a damning picture of Rollins improperly trying to influence the election of a new Suffolk County district attorney — the position she vacated to take the US attorney’s post.
But covering her potential violations of the federal law in the DA’s contest seems to have presented journalists at the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald with a quandary: It turns out that they knew about those misdeeds, but by playing ball with Rollins and accepting leaked information from her as an anonymous source, as the federal reports conclude they did, the journalists couldn’t report on her violations without breaking the widely accepted media commitment to protect such sources.
The strange upshot of all this: Reporters have for months been covering news of an investigation of a Hatch Act violation connected to Rollins’s appearance at the DNC fundraiser with Jill Biden all while knowing — first hand — that she committed far more serious Hatch Act violations in trying to influence the outcome of the DA’s race.
These sorts of back-channel communications are commonplace in the world of political journalism, where reporters and political figures often use each other for their own ends. But rarely do these exchanges come to light.
In this case, however, the federal investigations of Rollins explore in enormous detail how she funneled information to reporters at the Globe and Herald to undercut the candidacy of Kevin Hayden for Suffolk County DA. Hayden was running against Ricardo Arroyo, the candidate Rollins favored in the race.
According to the federal ethics reports, Rollins fed “negative information” about Hayden to Globe reporters, who then used that information in preparing several stories focused on Hayden’s failure to prosecute misconduct by an MBTA police officer.
Rollins then took her campaign against Hayden up a notch, seeking to create the impression that the Department of Justice was investigating Hayden for public corruption in connection with the MBTA investigation. While prosecutors in her office apparently wanted nothing to do with such a probe, Rollins succeeded in securing a recusal for her office from any probe into Hayden, a ruling that would suggest that such a probe was either in the works or could be soon.
The Boston Herald learned of the coming recusal from Rollins before the primary election but chose not to write about it, in part because other officials at the Justice Department warned the paper off.
After the primary, the story gained traction at the Herald and Rollins obliged by sending a picture of the actual recusal letter to a Herald reporter.
Rollins and the reporter worked out how the information would be sourced (“not attributed to me,” Rollins told the reporter) and what the story would say. In the federal ethics reports, it’s all captured in transcripts of texts between the two of them.
Shortly after the story went public, Rollins dummied up and pretended to know nothing about it inside her own office, sending a text to three employees demanding to know how the recusal letter ended up in the Herald.
“Wtf!?!” she texted “When was the office contacted about this? And why wasn’t I called? How are they quoting things?”
She also told federal investigators she didn’t have anything to do with the leak, and only came clean after they obtained transcripts of her phone calls and texts that she herself provided.
Rollins said she provided the recusal letter to prove to the Herald that the allegations against Hayden were being investigated. She indicated the Herald reporter had told her he was hearing the allegations against Hayden were not being investigated.
“I’m not saying it was right,” Rollins told federal investigators, who concluded that it clearly wasn’t.
The Herald story on her recusal that Rollins ginned up piggybacked off the earlier Globe stories about the T police incident for which she also quietly fed information to reporters.
“A federal law-enforcement source said this centers around the Boston Globe story that made claims and suggestions that Hayden and his top deputy Kevin Mullen broomed an investigation into allegedly false reports written by MBTA Transit Police officers,” the Herald reported.
What did Rollins have to say about it all?
“A spokeswoman for Rollins’ office declined to comment,” the Herald reported.