Three decades ago, it was Richard Nixon's eighteen and a half minutes — the empty stretch of tape through which a presidency fell, dragging a disillusioned nation with it. Today, technological advances mean longer spans of political chicanery.

As the dogged GOP blogger Urban Elephants reports, Republican state-comptroller candidate J. Christopher Callaghan today accused his opponent, incumbent Alan Hevesi, of ordering a state employee to erase the hard drive of a computer Hevesi had loaned out to family members. In a letter to the State Ethics Commission, Callaghan said he had called Hevesi's fraud hotline on October 4 to report the unauthorized use of a state laptop. After his call, the hard drive was "scrubbed clean."

"It has been suggested that the recent complaints I've made about Mr. Hevesi to your office, to that of the Albany County District Attorney, and to that of the New York State Board of Elections are politically motivated and timed to damage my opponent's chances of reelection. That's very true but also irrelevant," Callaghan wrote.

Callaghan's probing questions took a sharper tone in a huffy press release also issued today: "It appears that the Comptroller, instead of looking into the matter I had called his hotline to report, may have skipped to the last step and simply eliminated the evidence. What are they trying to hide, and did they force an unsuspecting civil servant to hide it? This is a legitimate question for the Ethics Commission, I believe."

What was on that laptop? A book report? Photos of the family dog? A Hevesi family playlist? The public has a right to know. This state needs people like Chris Callaghan, who places petty calls to fraud hotlines and admits that his actions are politically motivated and timed to damage Hevesi's chance of reelection.

Callaghan Press Release: Hevesi Hard Drive Wiped Clean [Empire Newswire]
Callaghan's Letter to the State Ethics Commission [Empire Newswire]