Last month, DeKalb County CEO Burrell Ellis was suspended from office until 14 felony corruption charges against him can be resolved. In a grand jury indictment, Ellis is accused of shaking down companies that sought contracts with the county, steering business to firms that agreed to contribute to his campaign, and stripping business from those that refused.
Setting aside the question of Ellis’ personal guilt or innocence, the case raises uncomfortable questions about the interplay between government contracts and campaign contributions. After all, only the naive would pretend that campaign contributions from those seeking government business are anything but standard in American politics, not just in DeKalb County but at every level of government.
So where is that line between what is supposedly ethical, and what is supposedly criminal?
One way to explore that question is to take what we know about the Ellis case and compare it to another situation involving political contributions and government contracts, a case in which no charges of criminality have been suggested. The situation involves Gov. Nathan Deal, who suspended Ellis from office, and a political action committee created by Deal’s closest friends and supporters.
As the AJC’s James Salzer recently reported, “A fund tied to Gov. Nathan Deal has quietly raised at least $459,000 over the past two years, mostly from big donors that do business with the state or have an interest in Capitol legislation. Because Real PAC of Georgia is a political action committee, the companies, lobbying organizations and individuals have been able to write checks up to $50,000, three times what they could legally give Deal’s re-election campaign directly.”
So one difference between the two cases — the amount of money involved — becomes glaring immediately. While Ellis typically collected campaign donations of roughly $1,500 and $2,000, Real PAC collected contributions many times that amount. As Salzer noted, political action committees have become a popular means of evading limits placed on direct campaign contributions by state law. Those limits were meant to reduce temptation for both the donor and beneficiary to swap cash for influence, but court rulings have opened up a variety of ways to legally evade them.
Ellis’ direct involvement in seeking donations from those trying to do business with DeKalb County, and his alleged heavy-handedness in those contacts, also contrasts with what little we know of Real PAC. There is no indication that the governor was in any way directly involved in operation of the PAC, although Deal’s longtime business partner, Ken Cronan, and his close friend Jim Walters served as PAC officers.
In legal terms, Deal’s distance from the PAC may be a crucial distinction. In practical terms, it matters less. The existence of Real PAC was not exactly well known, not even in Georgia political circles. Yet somehow, companies that were seeking major contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the state of Georgia learned of the PAC’s existence and decided that it would be wise to make significant contributions to a committee run by Deal associates.
Which leads us to another potentially crucial difference: Rick Thompson, former director of the Georgia ethics commission, serves as treasurer of Real PAC. As a political consultant, Thompson gets paid well to know exactly where legality ends and criminality begins. It’s a line that he knows well, even if it’s a little blurry to the rest of us.
