News is rolling in about Terry McAuliffe’s cabinet picks. At least one of them, however, is bound to raise a few eyebrows:
Longtime McAuliffe aide and deputy campaign manager Levar Stoney was named Secretary of the Commonwealth.
Stoney a former executive director of the Virginia Democratic Party, had worked for state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath in his failed 2009 gubernatorial bid.
Let’s fill out a detail or two Olympia left out of her profile of Mr. Stoney:
Levar Stoney, the deputy campaign manager for Terry McAuliffe’s campaign, admitted in 2006 that he lied to Milwaukee County interrogators to protect a handful of Democratic operatives who were later convicted of slashing the tires of Wisconsin Republican Party vans on Election Day.
“I wasn’t going to try and get my friends, my colleagues, in trouble. Nor was I going to get the Democratic Party in trouble as well,” Stoney, then a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote organizer in Wisconsin, told a Milwaukee County court.
So he lied to the cops and went on to greater glories…like working at that hopeless electric car company, GreenTech:
Stoney’s work with McAuliffe goes beyond the realm of Virginia Democratic politics. He was until December the director of public and government affairs for GreenTech Automotive, the hybrid and electric vehicle company that boasts McAuliffe as its chairman.
And what a bang-up job he did there. We can only wonder whether Stoney, as government affairs director, had any hand in or knowledge of the emails McAuliffe sent to various Department of Homeland Security officials over EB-5 visa approvals.
We may never know — unless someone in the General Assembly decides to press Stoney for information on that matter. And maybe a couple of questions about Stoney’s Wisconsin escapades are worth asking, too.
