Upstate New York Voters Just Elected A Dead Trumpist To The State Legislature

Friday, WYSL hate talk radio host/wing-nut Assemblyman Bill Nojay, a loud and early Trumpanzee backer, was due in court on fraud charges after embezzling money from a trust fund he had handled as an attorney. Instead, he decided to shoot himself a few feet from his family's burial plot at Riverside Cemetery. Longtime DWT readers may recall Nojay from 2012 when we looked into his deranged incitement of racial hatred against Japanese-American progressive congressional candidate Nate Shinagawa.

We don't celebrate anyone's suicide at DWT, not even a deplorable piece of crap like Nojay, who had the worst voting record of any member of the New York Assembly. After all, he had a wife and 3 children and both his parents are still alive. The world is, however, much better off without him, not just because of his racism and vicious right-wing politics, but because of his typically Republican crooked business practices.

Nojay has been at the middle of various controversies recently. He was a silent partner in a company that won a tentative contract to oversee the second phase of the $1.3 billion Rochester schools modernization project. And he was one of four defendants in a fraud trial in Cambodia, where Nojay and three other men formed a company to process and export rice. The four were accused of obtaining a $1 million investment from a wealthy Cambodian, then shutting the company down.

While multiple media outlets Friday linked Nojay's criminal charge to either the school modernization or the Cambodia project, the Cambodian case had nothing to do with it. And while agents reportedly found the alleged fraud as an offshoot of an investigation into the modernization program, the criminal charge had nothing to do with that matter either.

Instead, Nojay was to be criminally charged in connection with the alleged disappearance of funds from an account he managed for a longtime client and friend, architect Carlton "Bud" DeWolff, sources said.

DeWolff said Friday afternoon that the FBI had informed him several weeks ago that $1.8 million from the escrow account had been traced to Nojay, who had access to the money as DeWolff's lawyer. At first the FBI thought DeWolff was involved in diverting the funds but DeWolff said he convinced them that he had not been.

It's unclear how much of the money Nojay was accused of embezzling.

The funds originated from a major project for which DeWolff provided architectural services-- the King Hussein Center for Biotechnology and Cancer, a large medical complex near Amman, Jordan. The funds in the escrow account were intended to pay for DeWolff's services.

DeWolff said Friday that in recent weeks Nojay had returned much of the money that had been taken from the escrow account.

Yesterday, the NY Times reported that voters in his very Republican district-- which stretches from Pittsford southeast of Rochester down through Honeoye Falls, Geneseo, Mount Morris, Nunda and Dansville to just south of Hornell (all of Livingston County, southern Monroe County and northwestern Steuben County) were urged by the GOP "to cast their ballots for a dead man. Three men in a room are preparing to pick his political heir. The funeral has yet to be held, but the struggle to replace him is already on... Republican party leaders in the three counties that fall partly or fully within the 133rd Assembly District-- Livingston, Monroe and Steuben-- will choose someone to run as the general-election Republican candidate in his place. They have until 10 days after his death to do so, or about a week" from today.

The choice of a successor for Mr. Nojay lies with the chairmen of the Republican parties in each of the three counties, whose votes will be weighted according to the percentage of votes cast in each county the last time Mr. Nojay was elected. Given the district’s deep Republican bent, whoever ends up with the nomination will most likely go on to Albany next year to join the Republican minority in the Assembly.

Lowell Conrad, the chairman of the Livingston County GOP, who will have the biggest say in who gets the nomination now, said he wants to replace Nojay with someone "as close to him as possible, philosophically." Presumably he's talking about the racism and Trumpism and all that crap that Nojay espoused in public, not Nojay's private penchant for stealing whatever wasn't nailed down and super-glued.

So what happened? Counting finished at 11:30 PM (ET) and with all the votes now counted, Nojay won. There are 34,432 registered Republicans eligible to vote in the 103 precincts that make up the 133rd Assembly District. The corrupt, dead wing-nut beat the live Republican mayor of Honeoye Falls, Richard Milne, 2,736 (60.25%) to 1,763 (38.82%).