Speaker O'Brien press conference on DJ fraud, 5/29/12
Channel: impolitical
Date: 2012-05-29

NH House Speaker William O'Brien holds a press conference to announce new majority leader (Peter Silva) and fend off suggestions that he did anything other than utterly honorable in the DJ Bettencourt fraud scandal.

The video starts in the anteroom a couple of minutes into the press conference, and moves into the Speaker's office.

Rep. Peter Silva (deputy majority leader until today) and Deputy Speaker Pam Tucker flank O'Brien. The reporter immediately to the left of the camera is Josh Rogers of NHPR. To Silva's right, usually out of view, is Ways & Means chair and new deputy majority leader Rep. Stephen Stepanek.

For those new to this affair, NH House Majority Leader Bettencourt fabricated an entire 165-hour externship (well, fabricated 164 hours of it, technically) with elaborate and utterly fraudulent details of court dates, hearings and meetings with actual people and presented it to his law school (which he Facebook-posted that he graduated from last week). The state representative he spent one hour of an internship with before never showing up again got curious about the whole "graduating on time" thing, contacted the law school, and things fell apart.