From the NH Journal
AG Gets Election Law Conviction Against Small-Town Newspaper, but Illegal Mail Case Languishes
Posted to Politics December 07, 2023 by Damien Fisher
Attorney General John Formella announced Thursday that Londonderry Times publisher Debra Paul has been convicted on five counts of violating state law on political advertising.
However, Formella has yet to announce any charges — or any enforcement actions at all — over hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal political mailers sent into New Hampshire by a Democrat mail shop to interfere in the Second Congressional District GOP primary.
Paul, 64, could get up to a year in jail on each count and faces up to $2,000 in fines for each conviction. She will be sentenced in the Derry District Court later this month. She failed to properly label political ads running in her papers.
Judge Kerry Steckowych issued the verdict Thursday following last month’s bench trial.
Paul repeatedly broke the law in the run-up to the 2022 municipal elections when she published ads for local political candidates and warrant articles in her small, local weeklies, the Londonderry Times and the Nutfield News, according to testimony at last month’s trial.
Paul’s attorney, Tony Naro, said his client never intended to be a criminal. She made repeated efforts to follow the instructions she got from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office but failed to meet the letter of the law.
“Her intent is abundantly clear. Her intent was to comply with the law,” Naro said in his closing argument. Paul simply struggled to understand how to do so, he said.
According to Naro, every advertisement used by the prosecution to bring the charges is clearly a political ad for school board candidates, town council candidates, and warrant articles. Paul’s crime was she did not make sure to have the words “paid political advertisement” in each ad she printed. Many were labeled “paid advertisement” or “advertisement.”
Read the complete article HERE
The Democratic mail shop in Massachusetts that barraged Second Congressional District mailboxes with illegal ads, Reynolds Dewalt, has not been shut down. Nor has it been charged with a crime, despite its admission that it sent Democratic-funded mailers with no disclosures of any kind to voters during the 2022 GOP primary.
Formella told NHJournal last week the case is a high priority in his office and that he has worked on it personally. Asked why more than a year had passed without any action, Formella declined to answer other than to say working across state lines slows down the legal process. And Formella denied Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, a partisan Democrat, was anything other than cooperative.
Still, as the Republican gubernatorial primary heats up — a high-profile race the Democratic Governors Association has already declared a priority — Granite State political operatives have noticed the difference between the treatment of Deb Paul and Reynolds Dewalt.