J.R. Pagliarini, left, with Chafee in February

Earlier: What’d Chafee’s campaign manager actually do?

A new wrinkle in the resignation of Chafee campaign manager J.R. Pagliarini has emerged in the last half-hour or so. It appears the leaked documents [pdf] may – may – have come from the R.I. Board of Governors for Higher Education. That panel is chaired by General Treasurer Frank Caprio’s father, Providence Municipal Court Judge Frank Caprio.

I just got off the phone with CCRI President Ray DiPasquale, who is also acting commissioner of the board of governors, who told me he’d only heard about his agency being the potential source of the documents within the last 10 minutes. “We don’t know where it came from or any of it other than what you’re telling me and what we’re all reading,” he said.

Even though Pagliarini used to work for the board of governors, the documents are addressed to the R.I. Board of Regents – which sets policy for K-12 schools in Rhode Island, but has been separate from the higher-ed agency for years now. The 301 Promenade St. address on the documents are an old address for DiPasquale’s agency, as well.

DiPasquale said the board of governors has begun trying to get to the bottom of where the documents came from.

As for the third major candidate in the race – Republican John Robitaille – he’s staying out of this latest brouhaha. His campaign manager declined to comment about it when I spoke with him a few minutes ago.

Update: The Board of Governors for Higher Education’s website notes it was called the Board of Regents from 1969 until 1981, which was the year the separate higher-ed board was created.

Update #2: The board of governors’ spokesman, Steve Maurano, tells me that 301 Promenade St. was the agency’s address until May 2008, when it moved to the Pastore complex in Cranston. The agency moved to its current address, 80 Washington St. in Providence, in June 2009.

In an e-mail, Maurano said he “will try to find out whether the leaked documents were ever received by us and, if so, what we did with them from there.”

Update #3: R.I. Department of Labor and Training spokeswoman Laura Hart confirms the leaked documents were “notices sent to the employer.” They’re a bit like receipts showing former employers how much their ex-employees received in jobless benefits. Although DLT is still investigating whether the documents could have come from inside DLT, they could also have come from the employer (see Update #2 above).

Pagliarini worked for the R.I. Board of Governors for Higher Education from March 2008 to July 2009, according to his LinkedIn page.

Update #4: Chafee spokesman Mike Trainor says his campaign is going to call on the Caprio campaign to prove the elder Caprio “did not know and authorize release of these documents,” which would be a violation of state and federal law. The Caprio campaign responded that the Chafee campaign should worry about the conduct of their own employees.

Trainor also gave a few more details on the time frame here. He said again that Pagliarini started working for Chafee on Jan. 4, two days after he received his last jobless benefits check. He also said Pagliarini asked to be paid on Jan. 15. The campaign’s payroll system “logged this backwards by two pay periods,” which is why compensation that Pagliarini received for his work in early January showed up in the payroll documentation as late December.

Basically, Trainor said, “in the narrowest possible technical legal sense it is true that J.R. was credited with compensation for Dec. 19 to Jan. 2.” But the work for which he was being compensated began on Jan. 4.

Update #5: Only in Rhode Island would a campaign manager’s previous job have been with an agency chaired by his opponent’s father, huh?

(image credit: Chafee for Governor)