Gov. Robert Ehrlich?s appointments secretary, Lawrence Hogan, said Tuesday evening that he would consider suing Sen. Thomas “Mac” Middleton, chairman of the committee investigating the administration?s hiring practices, for slander for suggesting Hogan lied to the panel.
Committee Democrats authorized an investigation last week into whether Hogan perjured himself.
Middleton “should be ashamed of the remarks he made,” Hogan said. He said that after the election he plans to talk to an attorney about whether he has grounds to sue.
“The facts speak for themselves,” Middleton said. There are major discrepancies between what Hogan told the committee and what was sworn to in an affidavit from John Sparkman, former director of the Maryland Environmental Service, about the employment of Vince Gardina, a Democratic Baltimore County councilman, Middleton said.
Hogan?s testimony was also contradicted by former Ehrlich aide Joseph Steffen, Middleton said.
“It is illegal to come before this committee and lie to this committee,” Middleton said at last week?s meeting. Afterward, he also told reporter Thomas Dennison of the Gazette of Politics and Business, “There is a real concern that [Hogan] lied to the committee.”
Hogan called those “slanderous remarks.”
“I?ve been saying the exact same thing for 20 months,” he said. “My truthful testimony conflicted with the fictional story they tried to tell.”
Hogan said, “The committee couldn?t find anything” that substantiated their charge of firings of 340 people in midlevel positions because they were Democrats.
The dispute over the firings and the yearlong probe into them turned into one of the most contentious battles between the Republican governor and the Democrat-controlled legislature.
“They exonerated me,” Ehrlich told The Examiner in a recent interview.
Assistant Attorney General Robert Zarnoch, chief counsel to the General Assembly, said any lawsuit by Hogan could prove difficult on several grounds.
First, anything said atthe hearing would fall under “the speech and debate privilege” that protects legislators from most suits. However, something said to a reporter outside of the meeting would not be covered.
The most serious hurdle is that Hogan is a public official, who has far less legal protection from potentially defamatory statements than private individuals. In that case, Hogan would have to prove that the statement was “knowingly and recklessly false.”
