NEW YORK, March 20 -- In the latest revelation of a series of gubernatorial sex scandals, Gov. David A. Paterson has admitted he might have billed a hotel tryst with his lover to his campaign, listing the expenditure as "constituent services."| "I'm just looking after my constituents! One of 'em, anyways" |
The Daily News also found that in 2002, Paterson's campaign paid $500 for "professional services" to Lila Kirton, 49, a high-ranking state employee with whom Paterson had an extramarital affair.
| I'll bet she was a 'professional' ... |
But he told the Daily News on Wednesday that while he was Senate minority leader, from 2002 to 2006, he once used a campaign credit card to pay for a room for a meeting with a woman at the Quality Hotel, now the Days Inn, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "I do remember that there was a time I might have had to use the [campaign] card because my other [personal] card didn't work," he said, adding that the room cost about $100.
| Sure, happens all the time, your personal card doesn't work so you pull out the taxpayers' card. Easy mistake to make ... |
Paterson said he "believed" he'd reimbursed the campaign for the room, but the Daily News could find no record of such a payment. "If I didn't, I will do it now," he said.
| Now that you've been caught ... |
Paterson said a different $500 payment to Kirton was to reimburse her contributions on his behalf to Carl McCall, then the Democratic candidate for governor. "She went to a fund-raiser that I couldn't go to. She went there and paid to get in. And we paid back for it," Paterson told the Daily News.
Such an expenditure might have been illegal, as a pass-through political donation on another person's behalf. "We know it wasn't a pass-through," because she made no contribution to Carl McCall, said Henry Berger, a counsel for the Paterson campaign.