A judge assigned a law clerk to work on a politically charged lawsuit that revoked the Burlington Republican organization line is a former Democratic staffer who once worked for one of the defendants in the lawsuit.
Nicholas J. Gangemi, a law clerk to Assignment Judge Jeanne Covert, had been a public information officer for Burlington County, where he worked directly with Joanne Schwartz, the county clerk whom Republicans were suing after she chose to remove their line and use an office block ballot for both primaries this year.
Assignment Judge Jeanne Covert consolidated two separate state court lawsuits dealing with organization line challenges across the state and decided to assign them to John E. Harrington, a veteran election law judge who serves on recall status. Covert specifically assigned the 28-year-old Gangemi to Harrington as his law clerk for the line cases.
As the judge who hired him, Covert knew Gangemi’s background, including nearly four years as a legislative aide in the New Jersey State Assembly; he has served as chief of staff to Assemblyman Reed Gusciora (D-Trenton) and as an aide to Gusciora after he became mayor of Trenton. The Haddonfield resident went to work in Burlington County in early 2019 after Democrats took control of the county government in the 2018 elections.
It’s not immediately clear how Gangemi got his job with Burlington County; one Democrat said he was hired on the strength of his work as an Assembly aide, but another suggested he had seen an advertisement and applied without any political influence. Either way, Gangemi was involved in communications strategies for several Democratic officials, including Schwartz.
Covert inexplicably sent her law clerk to work on a sensitive political case, and Gangemi didn’t say he had a conflict.
Sitting next to Gangemi in a courtroom on Wednesday, Harrington repeatedly referenced working with his law clerk to research election laws that might help him reach a decision. He specifically stated something the law clerk had found or discussed at several points. Harrington made his reliance on Gangemi clear.
Perhaps by coincidence, Gangemi was quietly removed from the lines lawsuit after the New Jersey Globe began making inquiries among South Jersey Democratic insiders and attorneys about Gangemi’s political ties.
The courts did not answer specific questions about the circumstances of Gangemi’s removal from the case or why another law clerk was temporarily assigned to Harrington but said he was no longer involved at this point to avoid the appearance of a conflict.
Gangemi did not respond to a call or text message on his cell phone; his personal cell phone number had been easily obtained since it was atop a Schwartz press release issued that listed Gangemi as the contact. The New Jersey courts had no comment.
On Thursday, Harrington ruled that Schwartz could use her own discretion to design ballots. He cited a preliminary injunction granted by U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi that barred county organization lines in the Democratic primary and a letter from Attorney General Matt Platkin saying he couldn’t defend the constitutionality of lines.
This morning, Harrington will hear the other part of the consolidated case: a bid by U.S. Senate candidate Albert Harshaw and House candidates Shirley Maia-Cusick, Gregg Mele, and Hector Castillo, seeking to invalidate Republican lines in the rest of the state.
Covert, who was closely tied to South Jersey Democratic politics before becoming a Superior Court judge in 2005, may be partly to blame for this possible ethical blip. She was an assistant Camden County Prosecutor, and her former husband, Kevin Covert, was the Burlington County Democratic Chairman in the 1990s.
As a politically active attorney in Burlington in those days, Harrington represented Kevin Covert on election matters.
In 1994, thirty years before he ruled that the county clerk, Schwartz, had the discretion to take away the Burlington County Republican organization line, Harrington represented the Burlington County Democrats in a prominent election law case, Lautenberg vs. Kelly, where he defended the right of candidates to bracket on a primary election ballot.
The Republican county clerk, Edward Kelly, had rejected a bid by Lautenberg, seeking his third term in the U.S. Senate, to bracket with other Democrats on the organization line. Kelly initially refused, and Harrington and others went to court; citing the right of free speech and association, Harrington and others were able to get a judge to strike a law that prohibited bracketing in U.S. Senate races as unconstitutional.
After Kevin Covert became county chairman, he listed his political heroes; one of whom was George E. Norcross III.
“If people are calling me another George Norcross four or five years from now, I’d be happy as a clam,” Kevin Covert said.