UPDATE: Mayor charged with publicizing expunged arrest hires noted defense lawyer, who rips prosecutor’s case

Hamilton Mayor Kelly Yaede and her campaign manager have been been charged with publicly revealing an opponent’s years-ago and now expunged arrest by posting it on a campaign blog ahead of the June Republican primary, which she won.

Authorities say Yaede’s campaign manager, Dan Scharfenberger, was the blog’s administrator, and he and Yaede controlled the blog’s content - even though her campaign has said publicly they had no idea who was behind the online site.

The charges come from an investigation by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office, which filed the disorderly person offenses in Hamilton Municipal Court, the office said.

And, the prosecutor’s office said Tuesday evening, the information from the person’s arrest came from an anonymous Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request left in Hamilton’s clerk’s office, which was ultimately fulfilled.

The OPRA requestor, the prosecutor’s office said, was Yaede’s chief of staff, Marty Flynn.

The office did not announce any charges against Flynn. Yaede did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The prosecutor’s office did not identify the person whose expungement was made public.

It was David Henderson, her primary challenger in June, who identified himself to NJ Advance Media. (He had admitted publicly during campaigning earlier this year that he’d been arrested in 2001 for domestic violence, but the case had been dismissed and expunged.)

“It’s vindication for me and my campaign for all the dirt they threw at me during the campaign,” Henderson said.

“And it underscores the criminal lengths that these people will undertake to keep a grasp on their corrupt administration," he said of the Yaede administration.

The complaints against Yaede and Scharfenberger allege they published the expungement information on hamiltonnjnews.blogspot.com, re-posted it on Yaede’s campaign Facebook page, and perpetuated it in local media outlets, in May and June of 2019.

In March, when the pro-Yaede blog was a widely discussed topic in Hamilton, Scharfenberger told The Trentonian newspaper that the Yaede campaign was not affiliated by the blog site. "There is somebody independently operating that,” he said.

The campaign was “just as shocked as the rest of the public" about Henderson’s past dealings with police, Scharfenberger said in the story.

The prosecutor’s office did not elaborate on how exactly an anonymous OPRA was fulfilled by the clerk’s office, but said Flynn was the person who left the request on the clerk’s office counter, on Feb. 7, 2019.

The office’s said it found infractions by a civilian Hamilton police department employee and referred it back to township police for administrative action, due to the criminal statute of limitations expiring.

“It should be noted that there was no criminal wrongdoing found on the part of the Hamilton Police Division in responding to the OPRA request and releasing the records,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Prosecutor’s detectives found that the issue dates to July 2008.

Then, Hamilton police’s Deputy Chief George Zimmer was responsible for expungement orders and maintaining proper disposition of those orders.

Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri said in a statement that the person’s notice of expungement, which is signed by a judge, was received by Hamilton police, but not appropriately delivered to the records clerk due to Zimmer’s sudden death on July 1, 2008.

Yaede is set to face Democrat and Hamilton Council President Jeffrey Martin in the November general election for mayor.

Anyone who may have served an expungement order with Hamilton police between July 1 and July 8, 2008, should contact the police at 609-581-4120 to verify the order was received and appropriate action was taken, the prosecutor’s office said.

Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @kevintshea. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.com’s newsletters.