New Jersey governor’s race heats up with candidate scandals
Latest polls show a dead heat between Sherrill and Ciattarelli in the race.
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New Jersey’s gubernatorial race between Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli is heating up with some scandals developing.
Revelations came out that Sherrill was barred from taking part in her commencement from the Naval Academy in 1994 amid the worst cheating scandal in the academy’s history.
The news is a result of a New Jersey Globe investigation that found Sherrill wasn’t allowed to walk at graduation because she failed to report several of her classmates who cheated on an exam – an act that Sherrill has now admitted to.
The Ciattarelli campaign calls it an honor code violation and wants Sherrill to release her disciplinary record.
"Always better to be open than anything. She, the other about a week ago, called on Ciattarelli to release his tax returns because she had released her financial files and said transparency is very important,” Brent Johnson, political reporter for NJ.com, told News 12.
Being conflated with all of this is a report that a Ciattarelli surrogate made a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request for Sherrill’s military record. An employee at the National Archives released largely un-redacted files containing the congresswoman’s Social Security number and other personal information. The National Archives says this was a mistake.
Sherrill’s campaign is calling for an investigation.
"The Trump administration blatantly violated federal law by releasing Mikie Sherrill's unredacted personal military records to an agent of the Ciattarelli campaign,” a spokesperson for the campaign wrote in a statement.
The campaign is claiming Sherrill’s records were then weaponized by the Ciattarelli campaign.
The Ciattarelli camp says the outrage is a misdirect because the files were released in June and they never used them. The campaign pointed out that all the information in the files was from after Sherrill graduated from the Naval Academy.
Latest polls show a dead heat between Sherrill and Ciattarelli in the race. Election Day is Nov. 4.
