Ethics cases shroud campaign for attorney general

Ten months ago, Attorney General Sam Olens was cruising to re-election, a Republican in a Republican state, backed by a half-dozen court victories and a full bank account.

That was then.

Since winter 2013, however, Olens has suffered through a pair of embarrassing episodes: His office indicted a powerful Republican state senator on a charge of stealing from the state but lost a jury verdict in December. Now, over the past two months, his office has been fined $10,000 by a judge and been publicly questioned for not turning over key documents in an ethics-related whistleblower lawsuit.

Still, the bespectacled, 57-year-old former Cobb County Commission chairman is a hands-on favorite to win another four years as the state’s top lawyer. But Democrat Greg Hecht, a former lawmaker and prosecutor, sees the potential for an upset.

Among his accomplishments, Olens can claim court victories in the decades-long water wars with Alabama and Florida. With the federal government threatening to block metro Atlanta’s access to Lake Lanier for water, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Georgia’s favor, keeping the taps open.

Olens has also made fighting fraud a priority and ramped up the state's efforts to prosecute those who abuse the Medicaid and Medicare programs. The state has recovered more than $190 million for state and federal coffers and gotten 38 convictions since 2011.

In three-plus years, Olens has also sought to stifle the growing sex trafficking industry, which has found an unfortunate home in Georgia. He joined with lawmakers to strengthen human trafficking laws in Georgia, where an estimated 200 to 500 children are victimized each month and where thousands of children are sold for sex each year.

Cheryl DeLuca-Johnson, executive director of Street Grace, a local nonprofit that works to end human trafficking, credits Olens with doing what few elected officials would.

“In 2009, when Street Grace was first started, it was very hard to get any elected officials to talk about this,” DeLuca-Johnson said. “Senator (Renee) Unterman was one of the few. When Sam came on and said this was a priority and immediately in 2011 started working on legislation, it was different and very encouraging.”

It was the state’s child safety crisis, however, that drew Hecht, 50, a former assistant district attorney in Clayton County, into the race. Reports that 180 children died in 2013 despite having a history with state social services floored him, Hecht said.

Hecht said he will release a plan to better protect children soon.

“As an assistant district attorney, I prosecuted a lot of child abuse cases and thought you could investigate and protect children much better,” he said. “The attorney general has been silent. And it’s time to act.”

Former Clayton County Sheriff Stanley Tuggle said Hecht has the tools to do so.

“When I worked with him it was always apparent he knew what he was talking about,” said Tuggle, who’s known Hecht for 20 years. “Whether it was good or bad on our behalf, he was willing to tell us up front.”

As for the high-profile loss in the case against state Sen. Don Balfour, Hecht notes that it was the only time Olens has prosecuted a high-profile public official and the case was so badly handled the state had to pay Balfour more than $150,000 in attorneys fees.

Balfour was accused of being reimbursed for official state travel for expenses he was not entitled to. After the accusations were brought to him, Olens turned to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to go digging.

“And the GBI in this case in no ifs, ands or butts said they thought we should take the matter to the grand jury,” Olens said.

Olens recognizes Balfour’s defense in the case — that he was sloppy in his bookkeeping but did not intentionally steal — was effective in getting an acquittal. Voters, Olens notes, had a different view, and Balfour finished third in a three-way Republican primary in July.

Then there’s the ethics commission soap opera. Olens’ office — but not Olens himself — has been fined $10,000 by a Fulton County judge for failing to turn over key documents in a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former commission director. In the lawsuit, which left taxpayers on the hook for $1.15 million in damages, back pay and attorneys fees, then-commission director Holly LaBerge gave Olens’ staff a memo she wrote in 2012 outlining texts and calls she received from top aides to Gov. Nathan Deal a week before the commission dismissed major complaints against the governor’s 2010 campaign. In the memo, LaBerge described feeling pressure from the contacts and said the agency had been threatened.

Career attorneys in Olens’ office determined the memo did not have to be given to former commission director Stacey Kalberman’s attorneys. Judge Ural Glanville earlier this month said that decision was wrong and fined both Olens’ office and LaBerge $10,000. LaBerge, who was later fired over the judge’s ruling, has appealed Glanville’s decision. Olens has yet to decide whether he’ll follow suit.

Olens has blamed LaBerge for the fiasco, saying his staff did not know LaBerge had emailed herself copies of the texts from Deal Chief of Staff Chris Riley and executive counsel Ryan Teague until after they were reported by the media in July. LaBerge was asked several times, Olens said, whether she had additional documents beyond the memo that could be considered relevant to Kalberman’s case and were told she did not.

Unsurprisingly, Hecht has used both the Balfour loss and the ethics commission fiasco to hammer Olens.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Olens is the first attorney general in Georgia to be sanctioned for hiding evidence and he keeps changing his story,” Hecht said. “He is throwing his client and, indirectly, his staff under the bus in a political move, and he does not take responsibility for his office and lack of leadership.”

Olens bristles at the charge. He brought an indictment against Balfour to court. Yes, the jury acquitted him, but, Olens said, if he wanted to play it safe, he never would have gone after a powerful state senator in the first place.

Olens also won’t return fire, except to defend the career attorneys in his office who do the grunt work for these high-profile cases.

“The lawyers in this office work every day to give the best representation to the state,” he said. “They practice law, not politics. It’s disturbing that an individual who wants my job so readily attacks them in the course of this campaign for his political gain.”

Polling in the race is thin. But a survey released Wednesday by Atlanta television station WXIA shows Olens leading Hecht 49 percent to 41 percent, with 10 percent undecided. The poll, conducted by SurveyUSA, has a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.