Maine: Scarcelli caught in her lie

Former Maine gubernatorial candidate and prospective Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rosa Scarcelli has been caught lying about her knowledge of her husband's involvement in the Cutler Files website controversy. MPBN's Aj Higgins has it all on tape, although he doesn't explicitly connect the dots for his listeners.

In the interview, Ms. Scarcelli says she knew her husband, Thomas Rhoads, had "done some Google" on Culter, but that she didn't learn of his involvement in the Cutler Files website until shortly after Labor Day and, as she says, prior to the Ethics Commission investigation, which officially went forward Oct. 20.

But here's what Scarcelli told the Portland Press Herald Oct. 27 -- nearly two months after she'd confronted her husband about the website: Scarcelli said in an interview that she and her husband have nothing to do with the website and that the rumors of their involvement are offensive. She said she hasn't even seen the site. "I have absolutely nothing to do with The Cutler Files, and I haven't even looked at the website," she said.

Another gem in the MPBN interview: listening to Mr. Rhoads try to pivot from asserting that his Cutler Files research was "just information collected out of personal interest" to his trying to sell it to Democratic nominee Libby Mitchell's campaign for $30,000. "Well, uh, it... it... I - I - I would hesitate to call it a price tag," Rhoads stammers "It was simply a discussion about what this might be worth." (He didn't inhale either.)

Apparently Scarcelli, her husband, and her campaign manager, Dennis Bailey, never digested an elementary rule in politics: a cover up is often more damaging than the crime.

[Update, 2/15/2011: Scarcelli tells me she didn't lie; see what you think of her defense in the lower part of the post.]