Register-Star report undermines Keeler’s interview claims
This site has sat down with both incumbent Columbia County District Attorney Paul Czajka and challenger Gene Keeler for interviews about their November election race. The resulting article had been slated to appear this week.
However, a report this morning in The Register-Star bears immediate discussion, since Keeler’s comments to reporter Amanda Purcell strongly suggest that the Democratic candidate has been less than honest in his assertions to this site.
The Register report also contains a stunning admission from Keeler that if elected, he would have to recuse himself from the prosecution of someone he previously called “a con man,” due to his own attempts to enlist that person to aid his campaign.
A Fordham legal ethics professor interviewed by Purcell agrees that Keeler’s actions are extremely troubling, describing the situation as “shocking” and “bizarre.”
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In his interview with this site, Keeler was given an opportunity to respond to repeated assertions by detractors that he has been collaborating with Stockport’s Jeffrey Yeh.
In an investigative report last summer by Roger Hannigan Gilson in The Other Hudson Valley, for which this site’s author contributed some background research, Yeh was described as having a “criminal career” which
“stretches back at least 26 years. Yeh has been charged with at least 26 crimes by police agencies, including at least 18 felonies. He has been sentenced to incarceration at least five times.
“The charges documented tend to revolve around theft, identity theft, electronic surveillance and possessing forged financial documents. Many of his victims were known to him, such as individuals who employed him, or people he knew socially.“
Visibly upset by a question about any potential connection between Yeh and his campaign, Keeler stood up and thundered “Absolutely not!”
Keeler then characterized Yeh as “a con man.” Several days later, he attempted to move this outburst off-the-record, though he had not asked in advance for it to be treated as such.
But now, in Purcell‘s candidate profiles for The Register-Star, Keeler calls his own veracity into question by stating the precise opposite. Rather than “absolutely not” in communication with that “con man,” Keeler told the paper on Thursday:
“he has been in communication with Jeffrey Yeh, who was indicted by a Columbia County grand jury in June on several felony charges related to alleged credit card theft. Yeh’s trial is scheduled to begin in January, after the winning candidate in the Nov. 5 election takes office.”
Keeler now admits to Purcell that he circulated negative information about Czajka to Yeh, which Yeh then published on his Facebook group. That page routinely features often salacious, usually anonymous and almost entirely unsubstantiated allegations about County law enforcement and judicial figures.
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Purcell smartly reached out to an independent legal ethics expert, Fordham Law professor James Cohen for an an outside view of the situation.
Cohen characterizes Keeler’s conflict of interest as “a breach of staggering proportion... It is totally unethical that an attorney and candidate for DA would speak to a defendant under criminal indictment.”
Keeler then attempts to brush off the formerly-denied association with Yeh as just “entertainment.” (He similarly told this site that he found Yeh’s antics “entertaining.”) Seeming to realize he may have gone too far, Keeler adds: “Do I have a problem about what [Yeh] says or does, libel and all that? Yes, there are issues there.”
When pressed by this site about why he had appeared to post in threads or like incendiary messages on Yeh’s controversial page, Keeler blamed his “fat fingar [sic].”
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On September 13th, this site asked Keeler in writing: “If you are elected D.A, is there any conflict of interest or prior relationship which would prevent you from continuing the existing cases against Yeh begun under Czajka?” Keeler responded:
“I have no relationship with him that would prevent me from being involved with a criminal procedure if he was a witness or defendant.”
But now readers learn from The Register-Star interview that if elected, Keeler does in fact plan to recuse himself from continuing Yeh’s prosecution:
“Keeler intends to recuse himself from the case on his first day in office, if elected, and ask the judge to appoint a special prosecutor from outside the county.”
So Keeler has absolutely nothing to do with that con man... and no reason to recuse himself from his prosecution... Except when he does.
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Keeler also insisted repeatedly in his September interview, and in subsequent direct messages, that he is “running a positive campaign.”
Both Keeler himself and sources within the Democratic Party have indicated that they did not want him engaging in the type of attacks which derailed his previous campaign.
Yet in the Register-Star article, Keeler launches a fusillade of unsubstantiated attacks, much like those of the “con man” he finds entertaining. Alleging “corruption” between the D.A.’s office and law enforcement, Keeler claims that his opponent has been “doing favors” such as “taking care of DWI records for years — reductions and disappearing cases.”
Pressed by Purcell “to produce names, Keeler did not and generalized by saying, ‘They’re police officers, former police officers. They’re everybody.’”
Leaving aside Keeler’s willingness to make extremely serious accusations without backing them up, at the very best he appears to have been less than committed to his pledge to “stay positive.”
Given that today’s political campaigns almost always involve some negative campaigning, readers might wonder why Keeler was straining so hard to keep things positive. The answer lies in his previous run for D.A., in 2011, when he published a faux-tabloid newspaper full of similarly-inflammatory material.
That Fall, the Columbia Paper’s Parry Teasdale raked Keeler over the coals for making scurrilous and unproven accusations. Teasdale lambasted the “flimsiness of his evidence,” along with “his exaggerations and innuendo,” concluding that his antics had left his campaign with “not a shred of credibility.”
It seems history is repeating itself.
