Looks like fallout from an ethics probe that, years later, has yet to touch bottom will be the theme of the day.
Late Tuesday, Attorney General Sam Olens issued this lengthy explanation of why a memo written by Holly LaBerge in July 2012, alleging a threat from Gov. Nathan Deal’s lawyer to hamstring the state ethics commission, never made it into the hands of attorneys for employees who say they were sacked for investigating the governor’s 2010 campaign.
Said Olens:
“Our civil lawyers determined it was not responsive to the discovery request in the civil litigation.”
In other words, the whistleblowers’ attorneys didn’t ask the right question that might have prompted the memo’s release. However, Olens said he did advise LaBerge to turn it over when the feds asked for relevant documents.
Not everyone is buying into the attorney general’s distinction. “If you gave it to the FBI, why wouldn’t you give it to the [Stacey] Kalberman case?” wondered Martha Zoller, the former GOP congressional candidate, this morning on WGAU (1340AM) in Athens.
Olens has a Democratic opponent this year – the lightly funded Greg Hecht, an attorney and former state senator. From his press release:
“Time and again Sam Olens has refused to act like the state’s chief law enforcement officer and investigate possible law breaking at the highest levels of state government. I want to be an attorney general who investigates and prosecutes corruption, not defend it and help cover it up by not investigating and withholding evidence.”
Then there was this stinging parallel from Lee Parks, attorney for Holly LaBerge – the state ethics commission’s current top staffer. From an interview with the AJC’s Nick Fouriezos:
“If the president’s chief of staff reached out to a federal agency and said, ‘You need to stop investigating my president or we will shut you down,’ that would probably be news.
“If that came out before President Obama’s re-election, he probably wouldn’t have been re-elected.”
Fouriezos also followed Jason Carter, Deal’s general election opponent, to Calhoun this weekend, and spotted a line or two in the Democrat’s stump speech that will probably be honed to reflect this week’s happenings.
As he has done in the past, Carter made specific mention of former Dalton mayor David Pennington, one of two GOP primary challengers to Deal — and the one who emphasized the ethics scandal:
“All of our Republican friends in northwest Georgia – don’t be afraid to go talk to them about what we’re doing, because they agree with us. My friend, who is the mayor of Dalton, who ran as a tea party candidate, when I called him the day after the [May 20] election, he said to me, ‘You know what I see when I travel this state? We are getting too poor to have a business climate that works.”
About the Author
