Monday, June 25, 2007

Fortune reporter: Garrity pulled me over, too

After New York Times reporter Mark Leibovitch reported on June 16 that an aide to Mitt Romney -- later identified as Jay Garrity, Romney's director of operations -- had ordered him to stop following Romney's car on a campaign trip to New Hampshire, Romney's campaign denied that Leibovitch's car was ever pulled over.

Now another reporter is saying she had an experience similar to Leibovitch's account. Marcia Vickers, a senior writer with Fortune magazine, said that while trailing Romney in New Hampshire on Memorial Day for a forthcoming magazine piece, Garrity instructed her at one point to stop tailing Romney's car.

Vickers said that after conducting a 45-minute interview with Romney in the car from Concord to Alton, she retrieved her own car in Alton and began following behind Romney's SUV en route to the next campaign stop in Wolfeboro. On the way, she said, Garrity steered the SUV into a dirt pull-off and instructed her and another car to do the same. Garrity then got out, approached her car, and asked who she was, Vickers said.

She said she told him she was with Fortune and had coordinated her reporting trip with the campaign. Garrity, she said, told her no one was allowed to follow Romney's car and ordered her to go ahead to the next campaign stop, at the Wolfeboro Inn.

Vickers said she was puzzled given how accommodating Romney's campaign team had otherwise been.

"I had gone to great pains to coordinate all this stuff with them," said Vickers, whose piece on Romney, "Mr. Fix-It," hits stands Thursday. "That's why this all kind of shocked me."

Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said Vickers's account comes as "a total surprise" and that he hadn't heard any complaint from her.

"We made every effort to accommodate the reporter, even going so far as to have staff transport her rental car so that she could easily get from event to event that day while interviewing the governor for her story," he said. "It was a day packed with travel events and by all accounts the travel, campaign stops and interview went successfully."

The incident with Leibovitch, in which Garrity, by Leibovitch's account, also told him he had run his license plate number, has prompted an investigation by the New Hampshire attorney general's office. State law prohibits private citizens from accessing license plate databases or pulling over fellow citizens. Garrity is now on paid leave amid an investigation by Massachusetts State Police into whether he impersonated a state trooper in a May 13 phone call to a Wilmington company.

Romney, asked at a Boston fund-raising event today about Garrity, said, "My view on Jay is at this stage, I give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope other people do, too."

Romney declined to say much more, citing the ongoing investigation. "He's a good guy and [I] wish him the very best, but this is really now in his hands," Romney said.

Posted by Scott Helman, Political Reporter at 07:03 PM

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