Arnie office 'will not release Latino row tapes'
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office has rejected a request it releases several hours of audio tape that contained the California governor’s now infamous comments about the mingling of “black blood” and “Latino blood”.
The letter from Schwarzenegger Legal Affairs Secretary Andrea Lynn Hoch came in response to a demand from the governor’s Democratic opponent in the November election, state Treasurer Phil Angelides.
Hoch said the audio files were obtained without authorisation from a password-protected area of the governor’s website. She also said they “were accessed in a way that would suggest to any reasonable person that the files had not been posted for public distribution”.
Aides for the Democratic candidate did not have an immediate reaction to Hoch’s letter.
Angelides has acknowledged that members of his campaign staff downloaded the audio files from the site and leaked a small portion of them to a Los Angeles Times reporter.
The recordings were from a speech-writing meeting in the governor’s office last March that included Schwarzenegger and a handful of aides. At one point, the governor and his chief of staff discussed the possible ethnicity of a Republican assemblywoman.
Referring to temperament, Schwarzenegger said that whether Cuban or Puerto Rican, “They are all very hot.”
“They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it,” Schwarzenegger says on the recording.
He apologised for the remarks the next day.
Angelides and his campaign officials maintain aides did nothing wrong in accessing the audio files.
