Breaking the Cycle Denying the Norm of Political Impunity

For years, a high-ranking Connecticut official ran a bribery and extortion scheme out of a state office entrusted with building our children’s schools. He was convicted on 21 federal counts. And this week, rather than face a single day of his sentence, Kosta Diamantis fled the country — while still drawing a taxpayer-funded state pension.

Let that sink in, because it is a portrait of everything that has gone wrong in Hartford. A public servant turned the public’s trust into a payday, got caught, was convicted — and still believed the rules simply did not apply to him. For far too long, and for far too many, that belief has been rewarded.

And the rot did not stop with one man. The same scandal reached into the state’s budget office and touched the office of Connecticut’s own top prosecutor. Diamantis now faces a second set of corruption allegations — accused of shutting down a state audit to protect a friend. This is not a single bad actor. It is a culture — one in which the powerful and the connected have come to expect that accountability is for other people.

I am running for Attorney General to end that expectation.

The Attorney General is the people’s lawyer — the one office whose client is not a party, not a governor, not an insider, but you. Its purpose is to be the check that says the law applies to everyone, especially those who have grown comfortable believing it doesn’t. That is the standard I will bring to this office.

My father spent his career at the Connecticut Auditors of Public Accounts, guarding the taxpayers’ money. I learned at his side that watching over the public’s dollars is a sacred trust — not a talking point you reach for when a scandal lands on the front page, but the everyday work of honest government.

Kosta Diamantis may have escaped a Connecticut courtroom. He should not escape the judgment of a state that is tired of being embarrassed by its own government. Connecticut deserves an Attorney General who treats corruption as the emergency it is — every day, not just the days it makes headlines.

That is the job. And with you, I intend to do it.