While trying to distance herself from the alleged malfeasance of a former New Britain tax official, Republican gubernatorial candidate Erin Stewart made a startling claim in a television interview: She frequently rejected bribe attempts never reported to authorities while she was the city’s mayor.

“All the time,” Stewart said.

With those three words cheerfully uttered in the final minute of a 14-minute interview posted Sunday on WTNH.com, an attempt at damage control instead created an opening for a Republican gubernatorial rival, Ryan Fazio, to raise doubts about Stewart’s political viability.

“Stewart admitted that she received bribe offers ‘all the time.’ It’s illegal for an elected official in Connecticut to not report a bribe offer,” Fazio’s campaign said in a statement. “Does this put her in legal jeopardy while running for office?” 

In an interview with Connecticut Mirror, Stewart said she never intended to suggest she was the target of serious efforts to offer her bribes to resolve overdue taxes but was rather the recipient of pleas by unsophisticated constituents to accept partial payments, including cash.

“It’s like these little old ladies that have, you know, envelopes full of cash in their hands. And it’s like, ‘Can you, can you help me? Can you help me figure something out if I don’t have enough to pay it?’ Things like that,” Stewart said Sunday night. “We’re talking about people who are trying to pay their taxes. We’re not talking about people who are trying to skirt the laws.”

That was not the impression left during her WTNH News 8 interview with Dennis House. 

“You think I didn’t have people that were in my office offering me things all the time?” Stewart told House. “And I would always say, ‘Get out. Get out. We don’t engage in that behavior. Get out.’ I mean, there are some, some pretty egregious cases of it, and I just wrote those people off, and I just didn’t talk to them anymore. But it’s pretty scary.”

A portion of the interview was broadcast on air Sunday morning on House’s public affairs program, “This Week in Connecticut.” The full interview was posted the same day on the television station’s web site.

The context of the interview was her Democratic successor, Mayor Bobby Sanchez, announcing Wednesday he had fired Cheryl Blogoslawski, who had managed tax collections as the city’s elected tax collector and then as a civil-service employee hired after a charter revision passed in 2022.

Sanchez had suspended Blogoslawski in February, alleging improprieties. 

The justification for the termination Wednesday was a four-page memo by an outside law firm Sanchez hired, the Crumbie Law Group, that asserted Blogoslawski backdated tax payments to spare herself and others from interest penalties on late payments. It stated Blogoslawski claimed she acted with the knowledge of Stewart’s office and in one case at its direction.

News of the termination and release of the memo came in an email to reporters at 12:05 p.m. Wednesday, just as Stewart was opening a press conference announcing Rep. Tim Ackert, R-Coventry, as her choice of a candidate for lieutenant governor — timing that Stewart complained was deliberate, a partisan dirty trick.

On WTNH, Stewart began by reiterating that she bore no responsibility for Blogoslawski, who was elected in 2007, six years before Stewart won the first of her six two-year terms as mayor. Stewart did not seek a seventh term last fall, opting to focus on her campaign for governor.

“But I will say this one thing that I feel very confident saying: I never directed the tax collector to back date anybody’s taxes. I never directed anyone to back date anyone’s taxes,” Stewart said. “So to imply that I had some wrongdoing here, it is political in nature. It’s quite ridiculous.”

House asked Stewart if she had suspected “unethical or illegal” actions by Blogoslawski.

“No, if you know Cheryl, you know that sometimes she can be a little, a little flighty, but she doesn’t mean anything bad,” Stewart said. “There was never any money that was missing. Did I have problems at some point with maybe some of the way that she handled some of the processes and procedures in that office? Yes.”

Blogoslawski did not return calls for comment Monday or last week.

The WTNH interview took an unexpected turn when House asked, “Did anyone ever come to you and say, ‘Listen, if you do this, I’ll donate to your campaign or I’ll do this’?”

“A hundred percent,” she replied.

“Who were these people?” he asked

“Oh, I’m not gonna say that. It’s irrelevant now,” Stewart replied.

House interjected, “That’s essentially offering you a bribe.”

“All the time,” she said.

State law requires elected officials to report offered bribes, an angle not pursued during the interview. To CT Mirror, Stewart insisted there was nothing to report.

What of the “pretty egregious cases” she mentioned to House?

Stewart said she was referring to the threatening behavior of a taxpayer delinquent on several properties, not proffered bribes.

“He was super unhinged. The cops got involved for his violent behavior. That was what made it egregious,” Stewart told CT Mirror. “And he was threatening. He was threatening us. He came in, he was saying that he was gonna slit my throat.”

Stewart, who previously had questioned Sanchez’s suspension of Blogoslawski as motivated by partisan politics, said she, too, had confronted the tax official in response to concerns that Blogoslawski had not been securing cash in the office safe before making bank deposits. One of the more colorful tidbits in Crumbie’s report — nearly $250,000 in cash once was left atop the safe overnight — came from a disciplinary process she initiated, Stewart said.

“It copies and pastes from meetings that I have had with her [Blogoslawski] where we talked about procedures with handling cash and putting cash in the safe and whatnot. These were conversations that I had had with her as mayor,” Stewart said.

Andrew Crumbie of the Crumbie Law Group did not respond to a request for comment. Sanchez questioned Stewart’s account, saying no action was taken against Blogoslawski until after he succeeded Stewart as mayor in November. A day before he fired her, Blogoslawski had declined to testify at a disciplinary hearing, Sanchez said.

Sanchez and Stewart also disagreed over her role in keeping Blogoslawski on the city payroll after the office of tax collector was eliminated, replaced by a revenue manager position subject to the local civil service commission. 

While Stewart told House she had hired Blogoslawski as revenue manager, she told CT Mirror that Blogoslawski stayed in city hall primarily through a hiring process in which she had little input other than signing the resolution that was passed by the city council. 

Stewart also said that a residency requirement left the city with only one applicant for the new post: Blogoslawski.

Sanchez said Stewart, if she was concerned about Blogoslawski’s performance as the elected tax collector, should have publicly opposed her hiring. The city was under no requirement to offer Blogoslawski the job; it could have advertised the opening.

Her efforts to distance herself from Blogoslawski ring hollow, he said.

“She was the mayor of the city. It’s like if anything happens now at City Hall, the buck stops with me. I’m the mayor. I run the city. I should know, and if I don’t know, shame on me, because I’m the person that would have to investigate and to look into anything that’s brought to my attention,” Sanchez said “ Apparently she knew about this. What did she do about it?”

Stewart said Sanchez is an ally of Gov. Ned Lamont, the Democrat seeking a third term, and not a disinterested observer.

Stewart generally has been seen as the frontrunner for winning the endorsement of the Republican state convention on May 16, but her campaign has yet to publicly claim commitments from a majority of the delegates. Fazio is expected to easily exceed the 15% of the delegate vote necessary to force a primary in August.

Stewart and Fazio each have qualified for public financing that will give them the same resources for a primary: $3.75 million. Prospects were uncertain that Betsy McCaughey, a third candidate for the GOP nomination, would qualify for public financing or the primary.

Stewart said she has detected no erosion of support in her calls to delegates since Sanchez released the Crumbie report and fired Blogoslawski on Wednesday.

“They see it for what it is, which is a political document, as opposed to a genuine third-party investigation,” Stewart said.