Lane wrote that she "discovered that there were children assigned to workers who were no longer employed by the state." She said this illegal practice explained why an internal audit found foster children going without a check from a social worker "for months at a time -- with the most severe case, a young girl, who had not been visited for seventeen months."
She sent a similar memo to Jervis S. Finney, the governor's chief counsel, under the heading, "Action Needed," and said "goals have not been met and three children have recently died, by homicide, within a four month time frame."
She said that despite her protests, the Ehrlich administration refused to respond.
On June 8, 2004, Lane was fired from her state job.
Gilbert J. Genn, a lobbyist and former lawmaker who befriended Lane at a GOP fundraiser, said he was so distressed by the situation that he wrote a three-page letter to the governor on July 13, 2004, urging him to intervene.
"There is an internal paper trail that is wide, incredibly damaging and a specific indictment of incompetence and cover-up at the highest levels," he wrote. "Because Ms. Lane was aware of these issues and tried to point them out to certain Administration officials, those officials felt the easier remedy was to silence the constructive critic rather than . . . make the necessary changes."
The governor said yesterday that he did not read the letter but passed it on to others in his administration.
There's no question Lane and Steffen were friendly during her time in state service -- scores of chummy e-mails between the two are among the 14,500 pages of Steffen's correspondence made public this month. Genn said the two later had a falling-out.
The exchanges Lane had with Steffen appear to be the fodder for the threat she made last month in the e-mail to the governor's top aides.
"As a result of your whisper campaign (assassination politics) which is outrageous and completely false, I am releasing four emails . . . " she wrote. "Every time I hear about Ehrlich people engaging in this whisper campaign about me, I will release information. These emails are merely the tip of the iceberg."
