Free Republic

ALBANY, Sept. 20 — The Albany County district attorney said on Thursday that Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his administration did not break any laws and acted within their authority in their handling of travel records related to the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno. The news was a victory for the Spitzer administration, which was knocked back on its heels when the state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo — a Democrat, as is the governor — issued a report in mid-July that found that the governor’s staff had misused the State Police in their effort to discredit Mr. Bruno, the...

GRAFTON, N.Y. — Pond View Way, a dirt road in this town of 2,125 residents, was completed late last year, but it is so new, and in such a remote location — eight miles west of the Vermont-Massachusetts border — that much of it does not appear on local maps. Living in a large but secluded house on Pond View Way is Kenneth R. Bruno, a lawyer and real estate broker. He was the district attorney for Rensselaer County from 1997 until 2003, when he resigned to become a lobbyist, with clients like Madison Square Garden. He is also the...

ALBANY, March 31 — One is a wisecracking if wandering orator, a silver-haired Korean War veteran and upstate entrepreneur with an acknowledged love of the cameras. The other is a gravel-throated lawyer from the Lower East Side whose voice rarely rises above a low rumble. His eyebrows are one of his most expressive features, undulating as his mouth frowns. The two, Joseph L. Bruno, the 76-year-old Republican Senate majority leader, and Sheldon Silver, 62, the Democratic Assembly speaker, have been clashing behind closed doors for more than a decade. Along with Gov. George E. Pataki, the two men steer the...