Gov. Nathan Deal likened his staff’s messages to the head of the state ethics commission to harmless contact between a defendant and a prosecutor before a trial, his most detailed explanation of the circumstances surrounding a memo that surfaced this week.
Deal’s comments on Thursday came in an interview with Erick Erickson, a conservative talk show host on WSB Radio, as he faces mounting pressure to explain why his aides contacted the commission’s director, Holly LaBerge, days before a hearing regarding long-pending ethics complaints against Deal’s 2010 campaign.
LaBerge said in the memo, which she said she drafted in July 2012, that Deal’s chief of staff Chris Riley and chief counsel Ryan Teague had contacted her several times prodding her to respond. She said she was urged to make the complaints “go away” and that Teague threatened the agency if she didn’t move to settle the cases without a public hearing.
Deal said in the hourlong interview with Erickson that what mattered most was there was no communication between his staff and the five members of the ethics commission, which ultimately levied a $3,350 penalty against the campaign for technical violations.
“Holly LaBerge is sort of like a prosecutor in the case,” the governor said. “Would you not expect us to try to engage with the prosecutor to find out when is the case going to be heard? The commission members are the judges - and when it finally got to them, they found it lacked merit.”
In the memo, LaBerge claims Teague told her that “it was not in the agency’s best interest for these cases to go to a hearing … nor was it in their best political interest either.”
Shortly after her return, the ethics commission voted to dismiss the major complaints against Deal. The complaints included claims Deal improperly paid for use of a private aircraft for campaign travel and questioned his use of campaign funds to pay legal fees during his 2010 campaign.
Deal, who previously told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he was “in the dark” about the bombshell memo, picked a friendly venue for the hourlong interview. Erickson is a Republican activist who founded the popular RedState conservative blog.
The governor said his staff reached out to LaBerge because it grew increasingly worried that the window to hash out the campaign complaints was closing, as the panel’s top lawyer was nearing a maternity leave. He said his top aides did nothing wrong by reaching out to her, and said the contact wasn’t threatening.
“The ethics commission director was on vacation that week,” said Deal. “She would not return calls from my private attorney. She would not tell us exactly what would be presented to the commission when they met the following week … We just couldn’t get any response back from her at all.”
Former DeKalb District Attorney Bob Wilson, one of the attorneys who investigated the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, interpreted the exchange between the governor’s staff and LaBerge differently. If Teague threatened LaBerge “that would be an inappropriate call,” he said.
“If the call, on the other hand, was simply a staff member of the governor’s office calling to say can you get this done as a state agency, so this office can stay focused on our task — that’s a different kind of call and that seems to be part of the debate here,” Wilson said.
“The governor’s statement doesn’t match exactly with this conversation.”
Georgia Democrats have seized on the memo. State Sen. Jason Carter, who is challenging Deal in November, said the memo shows a “pattern of intimidation and interference” by Deal’s office and called for an independent investigation.
George Anderson, a watchdog activist who frequently files ethics complaints, filed one Thursday alleging that Teague and Riley violated state law by intimidating LaBerge. It also accused Attorney General Sam Olens of failing to provide the memo during the discovery phase of whistleblower lawsuits by former ethics staffers. In all, the state agreed to pay about $3 million to the four plaintiffs.
The governor, for his part, told Erickson that one reason his staff needed to determine the logistics was because LaBerge wanted a hand-written check from him if he settled. An image of the check that LaBerge indicated she had received did not have his signature; Deal’s staff said that check was never deposited.
And he suggested, as he has done before, that he was unfairly targeted by the panel. He said ethics complaints have long been used as a “political tool” - one reason, perhaps, the word “ethics” has been stripped from the formal name of the commission.
“Why did they skip over all these other prior pending allegations and simply come to my case and concentrate there for over a year?” he asked. “Why would you focus on only one candidate, and not focus on the others? We’ve never had an answer to that.”
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