The state’s case was meant to be a slam dunk: Georgia Sen. Don Balfour, one of the state’s top political leaders, had already confessed to filing dozens of error-filled expense reports.
Now Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens is left explaining why he backed such a clunker.
A jury took less than three hours to find Balfour not guilty Thursday on all counts that he tried to steal money from the state, turning one of the state’s highest-profile criminal prosecutions into a mess of finger-pointing and sour grapes.
Olens never set foot in the courtroom during the three-day trial, but insisted after the verdict Balfour’s expense “requests were too numerous and systematic to be simply isolated mistakes,” he said in a statement issued by a spokeswoman. “If those requests had been submitted by an unelected state employee, they would have been prosecuted, and a state senator should not be held to a lower standard.”
Defense attorney William Hill Jr. claimed the state spent $1.5 million on the year-and-a-half investigation, basing his estimate on his past experience as an assistant attorney general under former Attorney General Mike Bowers. The amount could not be immediately verified, however. Olens’ spokeswoman said it “cost this office less than $100,” not counting the salaries of the prosecutors.
A tearful Balfour, reinstated to office and un-banished from the Senate’s GOP Caucus, tried to personally thank each juror as they left the court’s antechambers. He enveloped the jury forewoman into a bear hug after she delivered an impromptu tongue-lashing outside the building about why the case should never have reached their ears.
“Personally, when you started looking at the dollar amounts of the charges, it became, ‘Are we really here to talk about this?’ ” forewoman Vicki Hamilton said. The Senate, she noted, had already fined Balfour last year for his sloppiness.
“I mean, let’s face it, he paid $5,000 for a charge when he was (reprimanded) through the Ethics Committee,” Hamilton said. “So he did what he needed to do in terms of taking care of that issue. Why couldn’t we have handled the other ones the same kind of way?”
Once one of the most powerful politicians in Georgia, Balfour faced 18 felony counts related to expense reports he filed with the General Assembly over a five-year period. The former chairman of the Senate Rules Committee was accused of intentionally taking reimbursement for expenses to which he was not entitled — charges that could have brought him up to 10 years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.
He would also have lost his seat in the Senate, a seat he had been suspended from because of the charges. Thursday’s acquittal automatically lifted the suspension, restoring the Snellville politician to his District 9 seat. The Senate’s Republican leaders also announced Balfour had been reinstated by caucus members and restored to committee leadership positions he had been stripped of last month. That includes the chairmanship of the Senate Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee.
“I have spent 14 months of my life going through hell — 14 months — and not just me: my wife, my family,” said Balfour, who declined to talk much about the Senate’s internal politics.
“So how am I going to deal with leadership?” Balfour asked. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to go sit in my Senate seat and I’m going do what’s right for Georgia and I’m going to do right for my citizenship and that’s all I’m there for.”
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, who presides over the Senate as the chamber’s president, said he looked forward to welcoming Balfour back and “continuing to work with him to advance a conservative legislative agenda.”
Senate Pro Tem David Shafer, R-Duluth, took a less personal approach: “I am sure the verdict is an enormous relief to Sen. Balfour and his family. We have adopted procedures that will prevent misuse of legislative expense accounts going forward, including regular review of expense requests by the Senate Audit Subcommittee. We have a duty to be the best possible stewards of the state’s dollars.”
Prosecutors struggled over three days of testimony to show Balfour intentionally inserted errors into expense reports and mileage claims paid to him by the state. Almost immediately, starting with the state’s first witness Monday, the defense took hold of the trial’s narrative and turned it into one involving a nosy government’s obsession with the mistakes of an honest, overworked man.
The state’s case seemed riddled with gaffes, lackluster witnesses and confusion over a blizzard of paperwork and records.
Assistant Attorney General David McLaughlin seemed to frequently get bogged down in minutiae about how the state Legislature reimburses lawmakers for expenses related to their legislative work, relying heavily on printed copies of receipts, mileage forms and vouchers. Yet all three of the state’s witnesses testified that they either did not know of any intent on Balfour’s part to defraud the state or were not told he did anything on purpose.
For details on Balfour’s supposed criminal activity, McLaughlin relied on former GBI agent Wesley Horne, who handled the investigation into Balfour until he left the agency in October for a job with the University System of Georgia. Horne documented times when Balfour claimed per diem and in-town mileage when he was actually out of town, sometimes on international travel. Per diem is a daily amount lawmakers get for working on legislative business when the Legislature is not in session.
Even then, what was supposed to be the most damning evidence against Balfour collapsed into a long and often confusing muddle.
Worse for the prosecution, McLaughlin three separate times misstated pertinent dates in key moments of the case — giving the defense team opportunity to dramatically correct him in front of the jury. The confusion seemed to bolster Balfour’s claims that it was hard to keep track of this kind of information. Balfour’s team built its defense on the premise that Balfour made unintentional errors in his reports and did not intend to break the law.
Character witnesses, including two governors, a judge and Balfour’s wife, painted the senator as a selfless, if disorganized, public servant. In his own testimony, Balfour added to his credits, saying he didn’t smoke, “rarely” drank and was so unconcerned with monetary matters that he could not even come up with a ballpark figure on how much he earned as a Waffle House executive.
A seasoned politician, Balfour spoke plainly to the jury through about two hours of testimony. Only once did he show a flash of temper when he claimed that one count in the indictment, when he recalculated it, actually resulted in the state owing him money.
It was a theme throughout the trial. Balfour left untold thousands of dollars “on the table” by taking a voluntary reduction in his Waffle House salary equal to his legislative pay, by opting out of the state retirement system or by failing to claim allowable per diem charges or other reimbursements.
Balfour said he ran for the state Senate to help people, not make money.
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