Maggie Brooks went to the D&C Editorial Board yesterday, and because this is still 1955 and everyone waits for the paper newspaper to hit their steps before they’re sure it’s news, Jim Lawrence will write it up on Sunday. Until then, here’s the D&C’s liveblog transcript.

Editorial board member Larry Frye thinks he caught Maggie saying something out-of-sync with her party’s position on immigration, quoting her as saying “We can agree in principle with the president’s position”, referring to the Obama Administration’s recent decision to stop deporting illegal immigrants who arrived in the US as children.

Brian Sharp at the D&C has a follow-up story where the Slaughter campaign addresses Brooks’ criticism that she’s a Washington insider who’s never in the district by trotting out Maggie’s scandals. As a sidelight, Gerald Gamm gets to be as wrong as he was the last time he was quoted in the D&C:

Both are well known in the district and have “enormous reservoirs of goodwill,” said Gerald Gamm, chairman of the University of Rochester political science department. “Most voters like both of them. I think it’s really a risky strategy for either one of them to start attacking the other one.”

Brooks is running against an Democratic incumbent in a Democratic district. Presumably these Democrats are in general agreement on the issues with their fellow Democrat, Louise Slaughter. How the hell is Brooks going to win if she doesn’t convince voters there’s something wrong with Louise Slaughter?

Finally, as kind of an amusing sidelight to this little event, Maggie Brooks finally put some national issues on her website on the day of the meeting according to my monitoring software. I’ll have more on that in later posts.

The firing of the director of the Monroe County Crime Lab, Janet Anderson-Seaquist, has Maggie Brooks on the defensive.  Louise Slaughter’s office released a statement linking the firings to two scandals with the Airport director and the ROBUTRAD incident. Brooks’ weak defense is that her opponent is “playing politics”.

Since, as Clarke pointed out yesterday, every peep from the Brooks campaign has been about Brooks’ record in Monroe County rather than her position on national issues, it’s pretty weak sauce to complain when your opponent raises questions about trouble that happened on your watch. And Brooks’ statement that she fired Anderson-Seaquist the moment that she got the Inspector General’s report just raises the question of why it took a state investigation for Brooks to find out that her crime lab director told a pretty serious lie and mishandled a fair amount of evidence.

As News 10 points out, a California court ruling in 2011, a year after Anderson-Seaquist was appointed, was pretty scathing about Anderson-Seaquist “[making] things up as she went along”. Making stuff up becomes a lifelong habit, so this report makes me wonder whether the hiring process was mishandled by the Brooks administration.

Rachel Barnhart has some more details on the genesis of the Inspector General’s report, and points to this D&C piece on disagreements between the Crime Lab and the DA’s office. She also notes that defense attorneys approved of Anderson-Seaquist’s changes at the crime lab. Maybe Rachel has other information from her sources, but it sounds like the DA’s disagreement on some evidence was legitimate, and that the DA’s use of an outside testing lab proved they were right in at least one instance.

As with the firing of the last Airport Director, Brooks handled this one quickly and cleanly. Unless some new evidence comes up, I doubt this will have a major political impact on its own, since it doesn’t involve cigars, strippers or years of blatant political favors. But it does add one more to the list of personnel issues under Brooks’ watch, and that list was already long enough for Slaughter to name it as a serious issue this Fall.

(Photo by Clarke Condé.)