Gary Pearce posted on September 03, 2010 10:07
It’s Tom Fetzer’s job to run around the state sounding alarms. But it’s not the media’s responsibility to salivate every time he rings the bell.
There is no greater example than the Perdue flight flap. In the end, that looks to be nothing more than a few small licks of flame.
Fetzer did his best to fan them into a firestorm. But the dry tinder for the fire is a sometimes-disturbing attitude among the media, the public and zealous regulators. Even violent criminals are presumed innocent until proved guilty. In politics, it’s the opposite: All politicians are presumed guilty, even if proven innocent.
That presumption serves Fetzer and his party well during this campaign. But, if they win in November, they’ll get burned next.
I think it’s useful to set aside Fetzer’s hype and pay careful attention to the August 27 point-by-point rebuttal from Marc Farinella, Perdue’s campaign consultant. Few people have read it in full, so I provide it here for your Labor Day reading pleasure:
On Tuesday of this week, the State Board of Elections (SBOE) adopted a motion to levy a fine against the Perdue Committee for failing to report flights in a timely manner. The same motion, which passed on a 4 to 1 vote, explicitly stated that there was no evidence to indicate that anyone in the Perdue campaign intentionally violated reporting requirements.
The Perdue Committee’s failure to report 41 flights on time was discovered and made public by the Perdue Committee itself. It was not unearthed by an investigation. The Perdue Committee publicly detailed the flights over the course of several months in 2009 when it reported the results of a voluntary post-election self-audit. The Committee conducted the audit in order to make certain it had accounted for all expenditures properly. The SBOE and the Perdue campaign had agreed in early 2008 that it would make sense to conduct an audit after the election because the campaign’s transition from one software package to another created some imbalances on the summary pages of our campaign finance reports.
The unreported flights discovered during the Perdue Committee’s self-audit led to a complaint being filed by the state Republican Party. In response to the complaint, the State Board of Elections then initiated an investigation into the matter. Quite remarkably, the investigation was assigned to an SBOE employee who was the spouse of an elected officer of the state Republican Party. In other words, the investigation was conducted by the spouse of an elected officer of the organization that filed the complaint she was investigating. Why anyone thought that was a good idea from any perspective is beyond me, but that is what happened.
The investigation lasted eight months and apparently cost taxpayers in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. State GOP chairman Tom Fetzer was predictably unhappy that a majority of the members of the Board did not find, in the investigator’s report, sufficient justification for continuing the investigation or holding formal hearings. And so Mr. Fetzer reiterated his calls for various resignations and accused the SBOE chairman and executive director of “corruption” and “partisan white-wash” even though they were the same chairman and executive director who were instrumental in investigating and punishing Mike Easley and Jim Black.
Lost in all the political finger pointing are several essential points that I think explain why the SBOE decided to bring the Perdue matter to a close:
First, after an eight month investigation, there is still no one who was involved in the campaign, close to the campaign or had knowledge about how the campaign operated who is suggesting that anyone in the campaign sought to conceal information or intended to break the law. No one.
Second, the investigation turned up virtually nothing more than what the Perdue Committee had publicly disclosed on its own in 2009. In all that time and with all that effort, investigators found only one single unreported flight that the Perdue Committee had not itself already found and disclosed many months ago.
Third, investigators tried to build a case that the Perdue campaign knew of some unreported flights in early 2008 but chose to conceal them until after the election. But that allegation was shown to be false when the Perdue Committee pointed out that it had sent information (including dates, destinations, etc.) on unreported flights to the SBOE for an initial review in the first half of 2008. Obviously, if the campaign were trying to conceal those flights from the SBOE until after the election, it would not have sent the flight information to the SBOE in the first half of 2008.
It’s also worth noting that the aggregate value of all the flights that the Perdue campaign allegedly knew about in early 2008 but didn’t report until 2009 came to about $21,000. It doesn’t really make much sense to think that in a $17.5 million campaign, the Perdue committee would go to such great lengths and take such enormous risks just to delay paying or accounting for $21,000 until after the election. $21,000 was approximately twelve one-hundredths of one percent of the Perdue campaign’s total expenditures.
Partisan Republican mouthpieces like Mr. Fetzer like to argue that the Perdue campaign never would have reported any of these flights if it were not for the fact that Mike Easley got into trouble over flights. However, as noted above, the Perdue committee started talking to the SBOE about its unreported flights back in the first half of 2008, about five months or so before there was any suggestion that Easley had flight problems.
These and many other important facts were rarely reported over the course of the SBOE investigation. Instead, there was a rush to judgment on the part of many observers, including many well-intentioned ones. I think knowledge of these facts makes a difference to those who want to reach a fair and impartial conclusion about this matter. Hopefully, now, everyone can return to more productive endeavors.
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