Charles Stile

At 6:30 this evening on NJN, PoltickerNJ.com correspondent Matt Friedman will join a political roundtable to discuss New Jersey's current political scene. Friedman will be joined by Gannett New Jersey's Greg Volpe, Politifax's Nick Acocella, and the Bergen Record's Charles Stile, with NJN Senior Political Correspondent Michael Aron hosting the discussion.

The roundtable will recap the state's U.S. Senate primary elections, ongoing budget negotiations, legislative hearings on executive county school superintendents and the possibility that Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine's emails to Carla Katz may be made public.

The race to watch next week is the contest for Bergen County Republican Chairman, where incumbent Rob Ortiz, who took over after embattled party leader Guy Talarico resigned last June, faces a challenge from former Freeholder candidate Robert Yudin and former Bergen County Utilities Authority Chairman Ben Focarino, an old hand in the BCRO who ran against Ortiz last year. Ortiz has faced criticism for, among other things, promoting the embattled Andy Unanue for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination earlier this year.

Which Democratic presidential candidate is the real “agent of change”? 

That was the topic of The Record’s Charles Stile’s column on Tuesday.

In his political column previewing last night’s Hillary Clinton for President fundraiser organized by Bergen County Democrat Chair Joe Ferriero, Stile questioned the legitimacy of Clinton’s reform message.

The Record’s Charles Stile reported today that federal agents searched the Paramus home of State Sen. Joseph Coniglio, the target of a federal criminal investigation.  That will almost certainly create some chatter at Hillary Clinton’s national campaign headquarters, where a senior campaign official had a “conversation” in recent weeks about the Coniglio probe with lobbyist Harold Hodes, an advisor to the New Jersey Clinton campaign.

The Clinton campaign, sources say, wanted to hear from Hodes about his grand jury appearance, in response to a federal subpoena, regarding allegations that Coniglio obtained state funds for Hackensack University Medical Center while working as a paid consultant. At the time, Hodes’ firm, Public Strategies/Impact, was the HUMC lobbyist. The hospital received over $1 million in state grants while Coniglio was on their payroll.

Read an e-mail sent to The Record's Charles Stile and Alfred Doblin by State Senate Gerald Cardinale, in response to Stile's column on Cardinale's re-election campaign against Joseph Ariyan:

Next time someone criticizes New York-based network news coverage of local politics in New Jersey, consider this: WNBC-TV’s Brian Thompson covered the mass defection of Lyndhurst Republicans, but The Record – Bergen County’s daily newspaper -- did not.   This cycle, The Record’s columnists, specifically Charles Stile, Alfred Doblin and Herb Jackson, have been at the top of their game, and clearly dominating political coverage.  Stile broke the story that Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli traveled to Italy on a vacation with State Senator Joseph Coniglio, the target of a federal criminal probe.  It took The Record a week to run an editorial on Molinelli, and they never actually covered it as a news story.