An FBI investigation is never welcome news for a politician, but in the case of Gov. Nathan Deal, this one comes on the cusp of an election year. At this point in the campaign season, opponents and supporters are both attuned to signs of potential weakness, and this certainly qualifies.
Deal’s attorney, Randy Evans, claims to be confident that the federal probe does not involve the governor directly, and he notes that no one in Deal’s office has been contacted or subpoenaed. That can be a good sign. It can also be a bad sign.
For the moment, federal subpoenas have been limited to five current or former employees of the state ethics commission, all of whom were involved in conducting an investigation into alleged irregularities in Deal’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. At least two of the five have claimed that they were forced out of their jobs by members of the ethics commission to short-circuit that investigation and protect the governor.
It has also been alleged that the commission’s new director — hired with the help of the governor’s office — then intervened inappropriately on the governor’s behalf to settle the case and make it go away, and that she ordered the removal of potentially incriminating documents.
Reviewing all that, the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office and the federal grand jury would seem to have several potential areas in which to focus:
- The original underlying allegations of irregularities in the 2010 Deal campaign.
- The alleged intervention of ethics commission members — three of the five are by law appointed by the governor — to block a thorough investigation.
- The alleged document removal ordered by the replacement director.
- Any role that Deal's office may have played in encouraging the removal of commission staff to short-circuit the probe. To date, no evidence of such a role has emerged publicly.
The results of that investigation aside, it is already clear that state officials from the governor on down need to make reform of the state ethics commission a high priority. I’ve covered politics in this state for almost a quarter century, and the idea that things have changed much is laughable.
Yes, the power structure now identifies itself as Republican rather than Democratic, but it is a change of labels not a change of mindset or in many cases even personality. For example, in an early push for ethics reform back in the early ’90s — a campaign that resulted in the first laws forcing lobbyists to at least report their expenditures — one of the members of the Senate conference committee negotiating the bill was a Democrat from Gainesville by the name of Nathan Deal.
Then as now, those who ran the state wanted nothing to do with an ethics commission that had authority, independence or resources to do the job that the public expected and its name suggested. A few years back, legislators even did away with that expectation by stripping the word “ethics” from the agency’s title, renaming it the “Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission.”
The result is an agency that … well, here’s how the commission itself sees its role, as described on its website:
“We serve the public, but our primary customers are Public Officials, Candidates for Public Office, Campaign and Non Campaign Committees and Lobbyists, as well as researchers.”
Reading that, it’s tempting to say that we have an ethics commission in name only, but heck, it’s not even that. And since we don’t have a state agency capable of looking over the shoulders of our state officials, I guess we’re forced to rely on the feds instead.
