The most crucial question: Is state ethics chief Holly LaBerge telling us the truth?
LaBerge claims that two years ago, on July 17, 2012, Gov. Nathan Deal’s top staff threatened the ethics commission with retaliation unless it produced the verdict that they demanded on an ethics case involving Deal’s 2010 campaign, and on the schedule that they also demanded.
That’s a serious charge, especially in light of a poll released this week by Channel Two Action News. It shows Deal trailing Democrat Jason Carter by a startling eight points in his bid for re-election, which may be the consequence of this ongoing ethics controversy. It certainly suggests that Deal is in for a real fight.
LaBerge has at least two strong arguments supporting her claim that she is telling the truth. First, she has a memo dated the same day of her 2012 conversation with Ryan Teague, the governor’s top attorney, in which she detailed their discussion. Among other things, it states:
“Ryan informed me that it wasn’t in the agency’s best interests for these cases to go to a hearing on Monday, nor was it is in their best political interest either and that (the ethics commission’s) rule-making authority may not happen if the complaints were not resolved by Monday. I responded by expressing my surprise that the threat of rule-making being withheld was being used to make the complaints go away.”
Second, LaBerge claims that on that same day two years ago, she related the troubling conversation to her boss, ethics commission chair Kevin Abernethy. Abernethy confirms that story, and confirms that LaBerge wrote the memo at his request.
However, Deal and his staff strongly dispute LaBerge’s version of events. In their own version, the governor’s top attorney was merely making an observation, not making a threat, when he told LaBerge that a failure to resolve the Deal case quickly would do harm to the ethics commission. And in remarks Thursday to reporter Doug Richards of Channel 11, Deal himself took it an important step further. He suggested, without offering proof, that LaBerge may have falsified the date on the memo and that she actually wrote it much later to bolster a planned lawsuit.
That too is a serious charge, with potential implications that go beyond the political to the criminal. It’s certainly not a suggestion that should be offered lightly.
Further complicating the story, Attorney General Sam Olens said this week that even if LaBerge’s statement is accurate, such behavior by the governor’s staff would break no state law and requires no further investigation by his office. In short, Olens believes that it is legal in Georgia for the subject of an ethics investigation to use the power of high office to intimidate those investigating him. Wow.
Olens was given the incriminating memo in August 2013, yet chose to withhold it from lawyers involved in four whistleblower lawsuits filed against the ethics commission. That decision adds to concern that the political system was more concerned about protecting Deal in getting to the truth. After all, the core issue in those lawsuits was that ethics investigations had been compromised by political pressure, and the LaBerge memo addresses that explicitly.
