ALBANY – The New York State Republican Committee is being investigated by the New York State Board of Elections and the Albany County District Attorney for alleged campaign fraud. The probe stems from Rep. Lee Zeldin’s attempt to secure the Independence Party ballot line for the November gubernatorial election against Governor Kathy Hochul.
John Haggerty, a Republican operative working out of the GOP’s headquarters in Albany allegedly oversaw the copying of several pages of Independence Party petitions containing approximately 11,000 signatures to help Zeldin submit the required amount of signatures needed for the ballot line.
Investigators believe that the additional copies were made and mixed in with the original pages to help Zeldin meet the 45,000-signature requirement. The copies were said to have been made at GOP headquarters where the petitions were prepared and bound before being submitted to the board of elections.
A total of approximately 53,000 signatures were submitted to the state before the May 31 deadline. After state review, the 11,000 photocopied signatures were disqualified, preventing Zeldin from meeting the threshold.
Fifty-three-year-old Haggerty, a close ally of State GOP Chairman Nick Langworthy, previously worked on former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 re-election campaign. In 2011 he was convicted of money laundering and grand larceny for stealing $75,000 from Bloomberg’s campaign for personal use. He spent more than a year in prison.
