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Daily Point

Ex-Rep. King wears no literary airs

Former Rep. Peter King has published a few action novels in the past — but this sure isn’t one of them.

A sharp-eyed Long Island political observer this week pointed The Point to a new entry on a Barnes & Noble website offering for $32 the title: “A Collection of Floor Statements of the Honorable Peter T. King.” The question was whether this was the retired pol’s latest shot at a statesman’s literary legacy.

Nope. When contacted on Tuesday, King didn’t even seem to know it was available. What King, 78, could tell us was that last summer he attended a staff reunion in Washington and was presented with such a collection, all of which is in the Congressional Record, anyway.

“I thought I had the only copy,” he quipped.

It turns out the statements were compiled from the public record by Michael Twinchek, who recently retired as a clerk with the House of Representatives after 28 years on the staff. He explains that he put it together as a commemoration of King’s congressional tenure from 1993 to 2021. King notes they aren’t all speeches delivered to the House; some were submitted for the record.

Twinchek explained when contacted, “It’s something I did in my own capacity … Some of the former staff have asked for a version of this. A version is now available.” Twinchek did the same type of compilation for the departure last year of Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. The $32 price on the King collection is simply for the cost of publishing and binding the 600-page volume, he said.

In other words, this is no commercial venture. 

More than two decades ago, King wrote three novels, called “Terrible Beauty,” “Deliver Us From Evil,” and “Vale of Tears.” Will he publish another book? King says he’s a few chapters into an autobiography, and has gotten up to his college years. In it, he said, he seeks to capture a thematic sense of the times from which he came.

— Dan Janison @Danjanison

Pencil Point

March Madness

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Talking Point

AG: Source of Haley donor leak unknown but not us

An internal probe by the New York Attorney General found no evidence that the online disclosure of donors to a Nikki Haley super PAC was intentional or done for political reasons. Instead, the report by Michael Jaffe, associate general counsel, concluded that “human errors” were the reason for the “inadvertent publication.”

The names of major donors to Stand for America were part of a Politico story published in August 2022 highlighting how the former South Carolina governor is using the nonprofit foundation to support her 2024 presidential ambitions. On the list were some of the biggest Republican donors including Ken Langone of Sands Point, who contributed $100,000.

Politico said it obtained the IRS filing from the watchdog group Documented, and that the forms included a stamp from the office of New York Attorney General Tish James, which regulates charities and requires copies of federal tax filings. When the Politico story was published, Haley said the disclosure was politically motivated and threatened a lawsuit against James, and also asked the Justice Department to investigate. But a spokeswoman for James said no lawsuit has been filed, nor had it been contacted by federal investigators.

The AG’s report obtained by The Point said that the confidential filings of 17 regulated charities were improperly posted to its public database on Dec. 12, 2021 and remained there until the office was notified of the error on Feb. 18, 2022. The files were removed within an hour of receiving “a call from a former OAG employee, who was working for another State agency” who wanted to give the office a “heads up.” The identity of that former staffer was not disclosed.

A forensic look at activity on the site found that only the records of Haley’s foundation were accessed, and likely downloaded on Feb. 11, 2022. The access came from an IP address, the report said, “of unknown ownership.” The investigation “determined that the IP address was registered to a web hosting company headquartered in Romania but with a heavy presence across Europe and in the Miami, Florida region. The individual user cannot be identified at this time as that information is not made publicly available by hosting companies, but the IP address is registered to the Miami based operation of the hosting company.”

The internal report said no AG employees accessed the file except for two who were involved in removing it from the database, and that no hacks of its servers were detected.

Requests for comment from Haley’s presidential campaign and the Save American Foundation were not returned.

— Rita Ciolli @RitaCiolli