Methinks her dad protests too much

From the NY Post:

Disgraced City Councilman Dan Halloran preyed upon the “naive” staffer with whom he carried on a yearlong affair — and should rot in jail, the woman’s father told The Post yesterday.

“He took advantage of a naive 19-to-20-year-old girl,” Meaghan Mapes’ dad, Walter Mapes, said of the pol, who is charged with trying to bribe state Sen. Malcolm Smith’s way onto the GOP mayoral ticket.

“What [Halloran] did to the public is nothing like what he did to me and my family,” Walter said outside the family’s home in Howard Beach, Queens.

The Post reported yesterday that Halloran, 41, spent about two nights a week shacking up with Meaghan at her Queens home near St. John’s University, where she attended classes while serving as Halloran’s deputy chief of staff.

“I was completely unaware of it,” said Walter, 48. “I knew nothing more than [Meaghan] was the deputy chief of staff and that they worked together; that was all that I knew.”

So dad had no idea what was going on?

His comments on this Facebook thread from September 2011 (since deleted) are very interesting, then.

(The photo has been omitted to protect the innocent canines.)

That's right, Queens pols. I'm watchin' ya!

The pagan and the Meaghan

From the NY Post:

The Queens city councilman at the center of the Malcolm Smith corruption scandal was a lousy husband, too — throwing away his marriage for a co-ed staffer half his age, The Post has learned.

Dan Halloran, 41 — who is charged in a bribe scheme to get state state Sen. Smith into the mayoral race — repeatedly hooked up with Meaghan Mapes, then 21, in her Queens home between 2010 and 2011, sources said.

She served as his deputy chief of staff during that same period, earning $30,000.

The relationship was the final straw for Halloran’s wife, Cynthia, and the two were locked in divorce proceedings by early 2011.

Halloran slept over about twice a week in Mapes’ basement pad, according to a roommate. She was studying government and politics at St. John’s University.

Mapes, now a law student at the University of Virginia, did not return calls for comment about her relationship with Halloran.

She first worked for him in his 2009 City Council run, and was cut three $1,000 checks — which a source said “pissed everyone off.”

“What did she do?” the source asked. “What about the other campaign staff workers?”

Her former roommate said she started bringing him to the apartment around the summer of 2010.

Halloran would sneak in and out of the apartment using a side door, and the two were glued to the hip, the roommate said.

So the worst kept secret in Queens politics is finally out? I wonder if another City Council ethics investigation will be brought since putting your mistress on the city payroll is pretty damn shady.