It’s Fidler vs. Storobin all over again. In a scathing letter to labor unions and progressive political clubs, outgoing Democratic Councilman Lew Fidler accused fellow Democrat Igor Oberman, who is seeking to represent the neighboring 48th council district, of leaking information to his one-time Republican opponent and current leading candidate for the Council district, David Storobin.

In the letter obtained by Politicker, Mr. Fidler  attributed his loss in the hotly-contested special election for the State Senate last year, losing by only 13 votes to Mr. Oberman passing along campaign secrets to his GOP rival, David Storobin. The dual loyalty, Mr. Fidler claims, was one of the contributing factors to his defeat.

“Igor Oberman purported to support me. In actuality, he was a ‘mole’ inside my campaign for Storobin,” Mr. Fidler charged. “I do not make such an accusation lightly. We knew at a point that information about our efforts with Russian speaking voters was leaking like a sieve within minutes and at a point we suspected the culprit. But the culprit revealed himself on election night, when Igor Oberman appeared at the Storobin victory party …. with his arms raised in triumph interlocked with Storobin.”

“Oberman has been paraded before you as if he is a paragon of progressiveness,” he continued in the letter addressed to groups like the Working Families Party, Hotel Trades Council and LGBT-oriented political clubs, on June 25, 2013. “He has high priced consultants in fancy suits. But you have been sold a bill of goods here. This is the same man who can embrace the most homophobic right wing effort in many a year … and not even have the integrity to do it openly.”

As evidence, Mr. Fidler pointed to a $500 July 2012 contribution Mr. Oberman made to Mr. Storobin when he was up for re-election against Senator Simcha Felder.

The Oberman campaign strongly disputed Mr. Fidler’s claims. “All of the claims in the letter are unsubstantiated,” said an Oberman spokeswoman. “Oberman was not at any time working for Storbin. He made a donation to Storobin when he was running against Simcha after Fidler’s campaign was long over.”

In response, Mr. Storobin issued a lengthy response to Mr. Fidler, accusing him of lying and trying to “destroy” him. Mr. Storobin also tried killing two birds at once, by refreshing the minds of those who might of forgotten Gregory Davidzon’s support of Fidler, who’s now backing his Rusian opponent Ari Kagan.

“There’s absolutely no truth to what Lew Fidler wrote. It was known that Igor and I know each other. Early in the campaign on January 19, 2012, he donated to me by coming to my fundraiser.

Lew Fidler tried to destroy me, but instead all his attacks only destroyed him. While we focused on issues and the differences between a conservative and a liberal candidate (which he found an outrage for some strange reason), he made up lies about me being a “tied to Nazis” (if I were tied to Nazis, I’d have been tied by the Nazis who’d then kill me for being a Jew and an outspoken Zionist), followed by repeated assaults by his paid agents against my mom including causing the biggest scandal in the history of the Russian-American community when they compared her to farm animals on live radio. His agents claimed that because I’m a criminal lawyer my “brain is defective” and that my brain changed through my affiliation with clients and is now “the same as murderers, rapists and drug dealers.”

Lew Fidler’s agents in the Russian media spent 8-10 hours EVERY day attacking me non-stop, with the radio station doing practically nothing except “Storobin is stupid, ugly and evil” programming from morning to night. There’s no way Fidler would’ve been able to get away with such viciousness had he not done it via a foreign-language media source that the FCC and the FEC don’t bother checking.

The result (according to an independent exit poll conducted by the Russian Division of the American Jewish Committee)? The Russian-Americans said that outrage at the negative attacks against me were a bigger reason for why they voted for me than any other issue or the fact that I’m a fellow Russian-American.

The day after the elections, the assaults continued for no apparent reason other than the bitterness of Fidler and his agents. The Fidler-paid radio declaring that my supporters are “pubic lice who need to be exterminated.” Talk about Nazi language in reference to a mostly Jewish crowd!

Nevertheless, I spent the following year trying repeatedly to rebuild my relationship with Fidler by calling him and by approaching him at all the events, but he remains a bitter man because when tried to destroy me, but he only destroyed himself.”

Read Mr. Fidler’s letter in full:

OBERMAN by Ross Barkan

(Jacob Kornbluh – YWN)