Daily News, The (Lebanon, PA)

March 20, 2008Section: LocalChallenger accuses Gingrich of forging nominating papersAuthor:

JOHN LATIMER Staff Writer Lebanon Daily News

Article Text:Republican state House candidate Russ Diamond is calling for the state's attorney general to conduct aninvestigation of incumbent Mauree Gingrich on charges that she forged signatures on her nominating petition.Gingrich denies any wrongdoing and said Diamond is coming dangerously close to libel in his accusation. She saidshe is confident that a court case on similar charges by Diamond will vindicate her.Diamond's most recent allegations are much more serious than the previous charges against Gingrich, which led tothe court case and claim that she violated election law by putting her notarized signature on a petition that she herself did not circulate.That same petition contained signatures of seven people who claimed they did not sign it. But until yesterday,Diamond had not accused Gingrich of being the one who actually forged their signatures.The Annville man, along with North Cornwall Township businessman Bruce Kreider, are running against Gingrich for the GOP nomination to the 101st District seat Gingrich has held since 2002.Diamond denied that he was trumping up evidence against Gingrich to bolster his campaign."The reason I took this action of depositing the information with the attorney general's office is so justice can beserved," he said. "It is not a campaign ploy."Gingrich, meanwhile, said she believes it is exactly that - and that Diamond is trying to get around the electionprocess."We need to get to the issues of the election," she said. "I am not going to labor over his accusations that crop upevery couple of weeks. ... He seems to want to circumvent the election. I'm not sure what (Diamond) is afraid of.Maybe it is being scrutinized himself. He is using every strategy he can find to remove me from the ballot."In his request to the attorney general, Diamond said he based the charges against Gingrich on the conclusionreached by Michael Robertson, a document and handwriting analyst and the only handwriting analyst he hired.Robertson, a former U.S. Secret Service agent for the Department of the Treasury, is a private investigator in Ohio.He came to his conclusion after comparing writing on the nominating petition with what he believed to be samples of Gingrich's handwriting on it and on other known documents.Although he couldn't say with absolute certainty that Gingrich had forged the signatures, Robertson said thehandwriting of the person who signed Gingrich's name on the known sample documents matched the allegedlyforged signatures on the nominating petition. Robertson's statement to that effect was included in the packet of information Diamond gave to the attorney general's office yesterday (it and Diamond's other accusation can be foundat his campaign Web site http://www.russdiamond.org)."The handwriting on the known documents I examined were all done by the same person and matched thehandwriting on the questioned document (petition)" he said yesterday. "Can I say without a doubt that MaureeGingrich signed them? No, because I wasn't there."Robertson's report to Diamond stated that the nominating petitions contained "unnatural or disguised writing" but thathis investigation was hampered because he only had a few samples of Gingrich's handwriting and no genuinesignature samples of the voters' in question.