Fumo: ‘I wish I never got elected to the Senate’

Former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo continued to face cross-examination today, as a prosecutor forced him to concede that his Senate staff fixed the home entertainment center at his house, installed a stereo in his power boat, paid his bills, banked his rents as landlord and worked on his campaigns.

Assistant U.S Attorney John J. Pease pressed the once-powerful Democrat to admit that all of this was wrong.

Fumo kept insisting that his aides volunteered for all this duty and that at the time he thought none of the work was "a big deal." But he did say he had regrets now.

"In retrospect," he testified, "I wish I never got elected to the Senate."

Fumo, 65, served in the Senate for 30 years until his retirement last Nov. 30, right after the start of his marathon trial. He is charged in the sweeping indictment with defrauding the Senate by having taxpayer-paid staff and consultants do personal tasks for him or work on his campaigns.

Pease confronted Fumo throughout the morning with hectoring and obscenity-laced e-mails in which the senator directed his staff to do personal chores for him or take on campaign work. Fumo often made his points by typing in a series of exclamation points.

The prosecutor accused Fumo of ordering his staff to take on non-Senate work. Fumo said his emails were not orders.

"It's a request. It's a strong request," Fumo told the 12 jurors. It's a demand, whatever you want to call it."

Fumo acknowledged that he never asked the staff to log hours, so as to distinguish between their state work and the personal or political work he said they volunteered to do.

As a result, he agreed, he could not say for sure whether work was done "on their own time or not."

He also reluctantly admitted that his staff routinely worked on his campaign using state-paid office space and state-paid computer and e-mail systems. In one e-mail shown him and the jury, Fumo had his staff do opposition research on a political opponent's campaign givers – and he explicitly told the staff that they could bill the Senate for the search cost and falsely tell it the work was related to legislation.

Asked about that, Fumo said his suggestion "rationalized' the real purpose of the research.

During yesterday afternoon's session, the defense objected to the line of cross-examination about ethics rulings, and Fumo's lead defense attorney, Dennis J. Cogan, asked the judge to instruct the jury that Fumo is not charged with any violations of the state ethics code.

U.S. District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter concluded that the questioning was proper.

Early this morning, defense attorney Peter Goldberger filed court papers in which he renewed the defense objections. He asked the judge to strike the cross-examination, give the jury cautionary instructions, or declare a mistrial -- which is unlikely.

Fumo, 65, who had been one of the most powerful Democrats in Harrisburg and in Philadelphia for decades, will face more questions from Assistant U.S. Attorney John J. Pease, who began cross-examination in the final two hours of yesterday's session before U.S. District Judge Buckwalter.

Fumo has insisted that he never meant to defraud the Senate or the nonprofit at the center of the sweeping indictment, and that he did not try to obstruct the FBI investigation.