The mayor said he deliberated for months about how to fend off the rumors and could not come up with a workable strategy.
"The cowardly and hurtful, insidious and vicious nature of this sort of character smear is that there is so little that you can do to defend your family and the integrity of your marriage against these sorts of attacks without aiding those whose primary goal is to spread these falsehoods," he said. "It's a very insidious thing."
"I don't put up with this," Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said of rumors being spread about the Baltimore mayor.
(Chris Gardner -- AP)
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Mosk on O'Malley Rumors: The Washington Post's Matthew Mosk discusses the ouster of a Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. aide on WTOP amid rumors accusing Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley of an extramarital affair.
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Steffen discussed the rumors on the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com during the summer of 2004. He posted them under the name NCPAC, a reference to one of his early employers, the National Conservative Political Action Committee.
In his postings in the chat room, and during a brief interview at his Maryland Insurance Administration office yesterday, Steffen acknowledged that he has a reputation for hardball politics.
"They call me the Prince of Darkness," Steffen said in the interview.
In the mid-1990s, Steffen worked on Ehrlich's congressional staff, and during Ehrlich's 1996 reelection campaign, Democratic candidate Connie DeJulius blamed Steffen for a leaflet that described her as a home wrecker.
Ehrlich said Steffen "handled some tough constituent issues" for him but was not engaged in dirty tricks.
Steffen joined the governor's transition team after the 2002 election and then took a series of jobs within the administration, which Ehrlich described as "troubleshooting." Ehrlich Chief of Staff Steven L. Kreseski said Steffen played an important part in helping a Republican administration take over a state bureaucracy that had been in Democratic hands for 36 years. "We needed people out in the agencies that the governor trusted, who understood his mind-set," Kreseski said.
Several of Steffen's co-workers said in interviews that he parachuted into agencies, set up an office with a statue of the grim reaper on his desk and began assembling lists of people who should be fired.
"I had been advised by my boss that he had a hit list," said Tom Burgess, a former state Department of Human Resources administrator who was fired after Ehrlich took office. "We were all very concerned about him."
Steffen said that he was asked "to go out and do assessments" at various agencies but that he could not discuss his work in detail "because of a blanket policy that no one talks personnel."
Until yesterday, Steffen worked as a spokesman for the Maryland Insurance Administration. Steffen's salary was $72,453.
Staff researchers Bobbye Pratt and Derek Willis contributed to this report.
