Editorial: Taxpayers keep getting Cooked!

Come on, governor, LaMar Cook’s case is becoming more absurd by the day.

An aide accused of having nearly eight kilograms, or about 18 pounds, of cocaine shipped to your state office in Springfield is now receiving state SNAP benefits while in Florida near Disney World.

His cocaine case is pending and all this after your administration gave him a $31,000 contract buyout after you fired him. ($31,439, to be exact, as we dug up because it is all taxpayer-funded, hard-earned money and somebody needs to actually care about that.)

You can’t make this stuff up.

Mr. Cook is cooking! After being released on a reduced $25,000 bail in March, down from the original $75,000, Cook caught another lucky break through the mother of his slain brother.

Ten days after Cook was released on bail, Sabrinna Marshall won $1 million on a new state lottery ticket game, becoming the game’s first-ever million-dollar prize winner, the Massachusetts State Lottery says. She opted for the one-time payment of $650,000 before taxes.

“She plans to help family and make home improvements with the winnings. She purchased her winning ticket at Big Y, 441 North Main St. in East Longmeadow. The store receives a $10,000 bonus for its sale of this ticket,” MassLottery said in a press release announcing the winnings. “The ‘$10,000,000 Cashword’ instant ticket includes seven more instant prizes of $1 million.”

We have reported all that and more. Now comes the SNAP absurdity.

Gov. Maura Healey’s food stamp agency, the Department of Transitional Assistance, blames the federal government for allocating an EBT card to Cook.

“Eligibility rules for SNAP are controlled by the federal government. Under federal regulations, DTA is prohibited from barring someone with pending criminal charges from SNAP eligibility,” a DTA spokesperson told the Herald when asked why Cook, with his list of serious criminal charges, is allowed to be spending his EBT card over one thousand miles out of state.

“SNAP is 100% federally funded. These are federal dollars,” the spokesperson added.

Blaming Trump’s team for your decision to hire someone to be your spokesman in an underserved section of the state and then seeing him indicted is cowardly.

We’ll say it for you: LaMar Cook, once paid $130,227 as your Western Massachusetts deputy director, should not be allowed to collect food stamps while out on bail. Period! The fact that he is doing so while traveling to the neighborhood where Disney World is located just rubs salt into this wound.

Taxpayers should expect better from their chief executive. Maybe some fury at times would at least show all the law-abiding citizens of this great state that someone actually cares about the taxes we are paying.

Plus, don’t even consider kicking this case over to state Attorney General Andrea Campbell; she may screw up the wording and actually allow LaMar to collect even more benefits.

Furthermore, why aren’t fellow Democrats coming to the defense of LaMar Cook in this SNAP slurping?

We’re stuck in the twilight zone of insane politics being played in Massachusetts where anything goes as long as you vote for the see-no-evil party on election day.…Read more by Boston Herald editorial staff