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“I was extremely annoyed because I was doing NY1 a favor by rushing to do their interview first in lieu of several other requests,” he wrote in a statement on Tuesday night. “The reporter knew that I was in a hurry and was only there to comment on the State of the Union, but insisted on taking a disrespectful and cheap shot at the end of the interview, because I did not have time to speak off-topic.”

“I verbally took the reporter to task and told him off, because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect, especially when I go out of my way to do that reporter a favor,” he wrote. “I doubt that I am the first member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won’t be the last.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/nyregion/rep-michael-grimm-threat-ny
1-reporter.html?_r=0

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But on Wednesday, Mr. Grimm seemed to have had a change of heart. “I was wrong,” he said in a statement. “I shouldn’t have allowed my emotions to get the better of me and lose my cool. I have apologized to Michael Scotto, which he graciously accepted, and will be scheduling a lunch soon.” Same

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This month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Diana K. Durand, a fund-raiser for Mr. Grimm, on charges that she illegally funneled more than $10,000 into his campaign. Mr. Grimm has also faced a continuing federal investigation into accusations that he or his campaign illegally solicited money from foreign donors. A key figure in the investigation, a former aide to a well-known Orthodox rabbi, Yoshiyahu Pinto, pleaded guilty last year to visa fraud. The aide, Ofer Biton, helped steer hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr. Grimm’s 2009-10 campaign.

Mr. Grimm, who was first elected with the help of Tea Party support, has been entangled in controversy involving a continuing federal investigation into his campaign fund-raising, including assertions by several contributors that Mr. Grimm or his chief fund-raiser told them that his campaign would find ways to get around the legal limit on donations. Same

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Rep. Michael Grimm’s bizarre and scary rant against Michael Scotto last night is not an isolated incident; it’s part of a pattern in which the congressman has tried to avoid questions about an ongoing probe into his campaign finances -- and then become enraged when we’ve dared to ask him about a legitimate story.
....
Following an interview with NY1’s Errol Louis in December of 2012, the congressman blew his top –- off-camera. Again, at issue was the fact that Louis had the temerity to ask Grimm about an investigation that recently led to an associate of the congressman being arrested and charged with illegally donating $10,000 to his campaign.

After the interview, Grimm became red-faced and started yelling at both Louis and me, alluding to settling the issue by “taking it outside” with our political anchor –- acting as if he were in a bar instead of a TV studio. He’s also complained to me when our reporters on Staten Island asked him about the probe when he was running for re-election in 2012. http://www.ny1.com/content/politics/ny1_political_itch/202681/ny1-itch
--a-grimm-tale-of-disunion-in-washington

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Mr. Grimm, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, is a former Marine and he often uses his military service to push back at criticism.

In 2010, when his Republican primary opponent Michael Allegretti accused him of wearing Army combat ribbons he did not earn, Mr. Grimm showed a flash of temper.

“You sleep under a blanket of freedom that I helped provide. You should just say, ‘Thank you,'” he said. “What I’ve done in my life, you see in the movies.”

Mr. Grimm’s response, however, raised some eyebrows because it is very similar to the lines spoken by Jack Nicholson in the movie “A Few Good Men.”

He is an avid weight lifter who earned the nickname Mikey Suits for his often flashy style. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/nyregion/rep-michael-grimm-threat-ny
1-reporter.html?_r=0

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involved an incident in July, 1999, at a night club called Caribbean Tropics, in Queens. At the time, Grimm was an agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An off-duty N.Y.P.D. officer named Gordon Williams, who was working at the nightclub, says that just after midnight Grimm entered with a woman. The woman’s estranged husband, who happened to be at the club, heatedly confronted Grimm. Williams helped separate the pair, for which Grimm thanked him. Williams recalls that Grimm then told him that the husband “don’t know who he’s fucking with … I’ll fuckin’ make him disappear where nobody will find him.” (Grimm has denied saying this.) Grimm, the woman, and the estranged husband all left the club. The story describes what Williams says happened next:

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Around 2:30 A.M., there was a commotion on the dance floor. According to Williams, somebody was shouting, “He’s got a gun!” Following a crowd into the club’s garage, Williams discovered that Grimm and the husband had returned, and Grimm was holding a weapon. Grimm was “carrying on like a madman,” Williams said. “He’s screaming, ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him.’ So I said to him, ‘Who are you?’ He put the gun back in his waist and said, ‘I’m a fucking F.B.I. agent, ain’t nobody gonna threaten me.’ ”

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(Grimm, as noted in the article, denied having made the statement, saying, “I don’t need to speak that way. A guy with a gun who knows how to use it doesn’t need to say anything.”) According to Williams’s account, Grimm then left the night club again. My story then describes Williams’s account of Grimm returning to the club a third time:

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Grimm left the club, but at 4 A.M., just before the club closed, he returned again, according to Williams, this time with another F.B.I. agent and a group of N.Y.P.D. officers. Grimm had told the police that he had been assaulted by the estranged husband and his friends. Williams said that Grimm took command of the scene, and refused to let the remaining patrons and employees leave. “Everybody get up against the fucking wall,” Williams recalled him saying. “The F.B.I. is in control.” Then Grimm, who apparently wanted to find the man with whom he’d had the original altercation, said something that Williams said he’ll never forget: “All the white people get out of here.”

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Another former N.Y.P.D. officer at the night club, Nirmilla Jitta, confirmed that it was Grimm who “forced everyone to stay in the club, saying that he was an FBI agent,” and that “he was the one that was doing all the talking.” Another witness also confirmed this aspect of the incident. Gordon Williams later filed a lawsuit for slander in Queens, which was shifted to federal court after Grimm’s defense attorney—a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office—argued that Grimm was “acting within the scope of his duties” at the club. Williams and Jitta both say they were never interviewed by the F.B.I. Williams says that witnesses were afraid to come forward to support him against the F.B.I., and he was told by an N.Y.P.D. union lawyer that he should consider his employment future were he to pursue the lawsuit. He didn’t respond to federal filings and the suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. The U.S. Attorney argued that Williams had not filed a official claim form, “nor any other notification of claim,” registering accusations against the F.B.I. (In Grimm’s account to the Staten Island Advance he notes that Williams “sent a letter to the Attorney General of the United States” making the allegations.)

Most of Grimm’s statements to the Advance echo what he told me, both in his office (before abruptly ending our interview, saying that “you don’t rate to come and question me on it, quite frankly”), and later in a letter sent to The New Yorker in response to fact-checking questions. Grimm says he only entered the club once near closing time and was jumped by the husband and several of his friends. To the Advance, he added the detail that “the altercation left ‘three of the four on the floor.’ ” As noted in my story, he said he did not brandish his gun, but merely moved it from his ankle holster to his waist band, “because the bouncers didn’t exactly look friendly.”

Grimm also made some puzzling new assertions to the Advance. He said that Williams “instituted a lawsuit claiming damages of a million dollars.” The amount claimed, according to court documents (below), was $25,000. Grimm further said that he would not have suggested that “all the white people” could leave, because “to the best of my recollection … I was the only white person there.” I interviewed an employee of the club who is white and is quoted in the story, saying that Grimm specifically told him and other employees to leave.

In the Advance article Grimm also says that Williams was “on the hot seat” for moonlighting at the club and for not calling 911 when Grimm asked him to. The first part is true, as detailed in “The Mark.” Williams was later suspended for working off-duty at Caribbean Tropics without permission, a fact I learned from Williams himself. The second part may be true, too. But Williams does point out that he was never prosecuted or disciplined for failing to assist another law-enforcement officer or interfering with an F.B.I. investigation. “I wasn’t arrested,” Williams told me Tuesday. “I had no criminal charge against me. I retired in good standing.” Of Grimm’s response, he said, “he’s lying.”

On Wednesday, Public Advocate for the City of New York Bill de Blasio issued a statement asking Grimm to join him in “calling on the New York City Police Department and the Justice Department to release all records surrounding this incident.” Gordon Williams, too, asked me to obtain the documents from the internal investigation of his conduct by the N.Y.P.D., which he says corroborate his story. As reported in “The Mark,” however, the N.Y.P.D. has not fulfilled a request under New York’s freedom-of-information laws for documents relating to the incident. The Department of Justice declined a Freedom of Information Act filing from The New Yorker this winter, requesting Grimm’s records. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/congressman-mic
hael-grimm-at-the-caribbean-tropics.html

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Republican Congressman Michael Grimm’s campaign office on Staten Island was allegedly vandalized and burglarized overnight. According to an email sent to reporters shortly after 2 p.m. by Mr. Grimm’s spokeswoman, Carol Danko, workers arrived at the office this morning to discover multiple windows that had apparently been broken.

Ms. Danko said Mr. Grimm is communicating with police and that he said, upon further investigation, the NYPD discovered computers inside the office had their hard drives erased. According to Ms. Danko, police believe the broken windows may have been a “cover up” to distract from the compromised computers.

Mr. Grimm described the incident as an unprecedented “assault on democracy and the political process:

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“This is a disgraceful act of cowardice that is beneath the people I represent. ...we have never seen an attack on a campaign escalate to this level. In 2010, campaigns across the nation were fueled with high levels of passion, yet even then we never saw anything as dirty or disgraceful as this. Even though this is not an official office, this heinous act represents an assault on democracy and the political process, more so than it does on me as person or a candidate. I do believe this is a politically motivated crime, and will continue to work closely with the NYPD in identifying and prosecuting those responsible.”

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Update: (4:05 p.m. 9/25): After taking criticism from fellow Democrats for his aggressive reaction to the incident, the crime turned out to be something much less sinister than Mr. Grimm feared: an 8th grader and his friend ( http://politicker.com/2012/09/exposed-8th-grader-admits-to-breaking-mi
chael-grimms-window/). The congressman now admits the alleged computer tampering may have actually been the inadvertent mistake of a campaign volunteer ( http://politicker.com/2012/09/michael-grimm-relieved-at-news-of-8th-gr
ader-vandalism/). http://politicker.com/2012/09/congressmans-campaign-office-allegedly-v
andalized-and-burglarized-on-staten-island/

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A source who attended a New York AFL-CIO breakfast for the state’s congressional delegation yesterday related to us a funny – and rather awkward – moment. During the breakfast, Long Island Democratic Congressman Steve Israel announced that he would have to leave early in order to go to a meeting of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats’ election arm, which Israel chairs. “But no one here should worry,” Israel reassured fellow delegation members, according to our source, referring to the fact that the DCCC is targeting a number of Republican incumbents who were in attendance. While most people laughed, Staten Island Republican Congressman Michael Grimm sat stone-faced. “You’re not laughing, Grimm,” Israel said, poking at his Republican colleague. According to our source, Grimm then picked up and wielded a butter knife from a dining table at the catered event, looked at Israel, and said simply, “I’m not laughing.” Responded Israel: “The difference between you and my Democratic colleagues is that you actually show the knife.” A spokeswoman for Grimm confirmed our source’s account of the event. http://www.cityandstateny.com/grimm-situation/

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