Mr. Potts says his old boss lied when he claimed he didn’t understand that his actions regarding campaign work by paid government staff was criminal.

“This is complete and unmitigated baloney,” Mr. Potts said in an e-mail to me (though in truth he used a much stronger term than “baloney”).

“When I was there, I personally took part in conversations with Bill that very explicitly told him these practices were illegal and that if he conducted business this way he would get caught, convicted and imprisoned,” Mr. Potts continued.

“Within a month of beginning work for Bill in 1990, I was part of a very heated conversation because I refused to allow one of my employees to do campaign work on taxpayer time and in our tax-funded office.

“It was part of the culture he refused to remedy and that he spread aggressively like a cancer through the body politic during his tenure in leadership. I suspect that after a while he simply stopped having people around him who would tell him to stop breaking the law.”

When I relayed those words to Mr. DeWeese a week before Christmas, he said he was parked in his pickup truck in Greene County with both hands on the wheel.

“This is not scripted,” he said, and he began a long rebuttal in his customary studied and deliberate way — but he did not immediately speak to the charges. Instead, he spoke of personal betrayal.

“Tim Potts was a first-rate press secretary and he performed his job in exemplary fashion. On the day he resigned from our senior staff to pursue an idealistic goal of advancing an educational foundation, I shook his hand, gave him a hug, and said, ‘If you ever need a job, and I’m privileged to be in this building as a senior member of the leadership team, you’ll have a job.’ ”

He then said he bumped into Mr. Potts recently at a Pennsylvania newspaper publishers event at the Hilton in Harrisburg. Mr. DeWeese said he extended his hand, which Mr. Potts took “reluctantly,” and reminded his former aide of those parting words.

Read the full Post-Gazette column here