Hartford, CT – This morning, the CT Mirror ran a story that showed irrefutable ties between Tom Foley and Grow Connecticut, a new “Super PAC” that has bought nearly $200,000 of airtime. Filling the airwaves with attack ads that distort the progress delivered by Governor Malloy over the last three and half years, the super PAC is led by the same people intimately involved in Tom Foley’s 2013 SEEC violation, in which a Foley poll was paid for by the outside group “Voters for Good Government”.

The Mirror story shows incontrovertible ties between Foley and the super PAC:

• Voters for Good Government, which spent hundreds of thousands on negative ads in 2012, was exposed for having ties to Foley.
• A poll was commissioned by Voters for Good Government, in conjunction with Foley and his 2010 and 2014 campaign manager Justin Clark, which was conducted by Foley’s pollster. Foley was found guilty by SEEC for failing to pay for the poll.
• Now, Liz Kurantowicz, the former state Republican Party official who ran Voters for Good Government, is treasurer for Grow Connecticut.
• Grow Connecticut was registered with the IRS by James E. Tyrrell III of the same firm that advised Foley’s campaign in 2010 and defended Foley before SEEC in 2013.

Last week, the Connecticut Republican Party filed a baseless SEEC complaint devoid of specifics regarding coordination. Chris Cooper, in his response to the Mirror regarding the super PAC, unwittingly undermined the GOP complaint’s premise, saying: “The mere existence of relationships, prior or current, doesn’t mean there is coordination.”

“Tom Foley, along with his super PAC allies, will do whatever he can to avoid talking about an agenda that would take Connecticut backwards, his record of destroying jobs at Bibb, and his callously insulting workers in Sprague. So instead, they’re distorting the progress Connecticut’s made over the last three and a half years under Governor Malloy,” said Democratic Party spokesman Devon Puglia. “The choice is clear: we can move forward with progress under Dan Malloy, or we can go backwards with the same old, failed GOP tactics that Tom Foley relies on.”

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