The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been covering Nathan Deal since the Republican congressman launched a bid for governor in 2009 and was the first news organization to report on his meetings with state Revenue Commissioner Bart Graham. Those stories — detailing efforts to keep a state program at Deal’s Gainesville salvage yard — led to an Office of Congressional Ethics probe. Deal left Congress before the investigation was complete.
The AJC has also reported extensively on the state ethics commission, including its handling of campaign finance complaints against Deal and the ouster of top commission lawyers, Stacey Kalberman and Sherilyn Streicker.
Since then, the AJC has kept close watch on the commission’s activities as it dismissed the most serious complaints against Deal and hired a new executive secretary, whose own conduct has come under fire. The AJC also extensively documented how the commission’s work has dropped off as its funding has shrunk.
Late last year, the AJC was first to report allegations from current and former commission staffers alleging wrongdoing at the agency. The FBI began interviewing current and former commission staffers after publication of those stories. Late last year, federal subpoenas demanded documents in the case.
This story was compiled using a variety of documents and sources. Among them was hundreds of pages of sworn testimony collected from key players in the whistleblower cases filed by Kalberman and Streicker alleging wrongful termination, the report issued by the Office of Congressional Ethics and state personnel records.
AJC reporters Aaron Gould Sheinin and Shannon McCaffrey have been covering Deal and the ethics commission issues since 2009.
Key Players:
Nathan Deal
The governor faced complaints that he personally profited from his campaign’s aircraft rentals from a company he partly owned, that he illegally used state campaign funds for legal bills related to a federal ethics investigation when he was a member of Congress and that he accepted campaign contributions that exceeded limits. The state ethics commission cleared Deal of major ethics violations in July 2012 while finding he made “technical defects” in a series of personal financial and campaign finance reports. Deal agreed to pay fees totaling $3,350.
Holly LaBerge
Before her appointment as executive director of the state ethics commission in August 2011, she was a lobbyist for the state Public Defenders Standards Council. She reportedly said that the governor owed her after the commission cleared him of major ethics violations in July 2012.
Stacey Kalberman
The former executive director of the state ethics commission was forced out of the position in June 2011 after then-Chairman Patrick Millsaps said a looming budget crisis for the commission had required him to cut her salary by 30 percent. Prior to that, Kalberman said she twice asked Millsaps to sign subpoenas involving the commission’s investigation into the complaints against Deal.
Sherilyn Streicker
Streicker was Kalberman’s top assistant and the investigator in the complaints against Deal. Her position was eliminated as a result of the commission’s financial difficulties, Millsaps said.
Patrick Millsaps
Millsaps was appointed to the state ethics commission in February 2009. He was chairman of the commission when it cut Kalberman’s pay from $125,000 to $85,000 and eliminated Streicker’s position. Millsaps resigned from the commission in November 2011 after a dispute arose about whether he had exceeded the legal amount of time on the commission. He later joined the presidential campaign of former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, eventually rising to the position of chief of staff of the campaign.
Chris Riley
Chief of staff to Gov. Nathan Deal and a founding member of HRPW Investments, a Gainesville partnership that owns an airplane. Deal’s private business, Gainesville Salvage & Disposal, also was a co-owner of the plane through its subsidiary, North Georgia Aviation. Riley later dropped out of the partnership but was the pilot of the plane when it carried Deal throughout the state during his successful 2010 campaign for governor.
Elisabeth Murray-Obertein
Murray-Obertein was a staff attorney with the ethics commission who claims that LaBerge intervened in Deal’s ethics case and repeatedly bragged of her relationship with the governor. She was recently fired after Capitol Police said they smelled alcohol on her breath on state property.
Robert Constantine
A former administrative law judge with the state Worker’s Compensation Board, Constantine was hired in December to help restore order and credibility at the commission. The AJC learned in January that he had been fired from the board after not meeting performance expectations. He was hired by the commission for a four-month period at $4,000 a month.
Timeline:
November 2010: Republican Nathan Deal elected governor
January-May 2011: The top two staff members of the state ethics commission, Executive Secretary Stacey Kalberman and her deputy, Sherilyn Streicker, open an investigation of the Deal campaign. They meet with federal prosecutors and the FBI concerning their inquiry. The two draw up subpoenas for Deal and others and prepare to serve them.
June 2011: Kalberman and Streicker are gone from their jobs. Streicker’s job is eliminated. Kalberman’s salary is cut from $120,000 to $85,000, and she resigns. The chairman of the ethics commission, Patrick Millsaps, says he needed to cut costs.
August 2011 Holly LaBerge, previously of the Public Defender Standards Counci, hired as new executive secretary of the state ethics commission.
June 2012: Kalberman and Streicker file separate whistle-blower lawsuits against the state.
July 23 2012: The state ethics commission clears Deal of major ethics violations while finding he made “technical defects” in a series of personal financial and campaign finance reports. Deal agrees to pay fees totaling $3,350.
September 2013: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that two staff members of the state ethics commission accused LaBerge of improperly intervening in the probe of Deal. Staff attorney Elisabeth Murray-Obertein and IT specialist John Hair made the accusations in sworn testimony taken as part of the whistleblower suits. Hair said LaBerge ordered him to destroy documents in the Deal file. Murray-Obertein said LaBerge bragged that Deal “owed” her for making his legal troubles go away. Deal denies wrongdoing.
Oct. 10, 2013: The AJC reports that the FBI has interviewed Murray-Obertein.
Oct. 22, 2013: State ethics commission votes to have the state auditor investigate the embattled agency.
Dec. 11, 2013: Federal investigators issue subpoenas to at least five current and former ethics commission staff members. They are seeking documents related to the Deal probe to present to a grand jury.
Dec. 19, 2013: In an effort to restore public confidence, the ethics commission votes unanimously to hire veteran lawyer Robert Constantine to oversee operations at the agency.
Jan. 6, 2013: Relying on personnel files obtained through an open records request, the AJC reports that Constantine was fired in August 2013 as a judge on the state board of workers compensation for “failure to meet performance expectations.”
February 2013: Deal and two top aides are supboened by Streicker and could testify in her lawsuit. A Fulton County Superior Court judge hears arguments on whether to allow Kalberman’s case to move forward but does not immediately issue a ruling.
Key Players:
Nathan Deal
The governor faced complaints that he personally profited from his campaign’s aircraft rentals from a company he partly owned, that he illegally used state campaign funds for legal bills related to a federal ethics investigation when he was a member of Congress and that he accepted campaign contributions that exceeded limits. The state ethics commission cleared Deal of major ethics violations in July 2012 while finding he made “technical defects” in a series of personal financial and campaign finance reports. Deal agreed to pay fees totaling $3,350.
Holly LaBerge
Before her appointment as executive director of the state ethics commission in August 2011, she was a lobbyist for the state Public Defenders Standards Council. She reportedly said that the governor owed her after the commission cleared him of major ethics violations in July 2012.
Stacey Kalberman
The former executive director of the state ethics commission was forced out of the position in June 2011 after then-Chairman Patrick Millsaps said a looming budget crisis for the commission had required him to cut her salary by 30 percent. Prior to that, Kalberman said she twice asked Millsaps to sign subpoenas involving the commission’s investigation into the complaints against Deal.
Sherilyn Streicker
Streicker was Kalberman’s top assistant and the investigator in the complaints against Deal. Her position was eliminated as a result of the commission’s financial difficulties, Millsaps said.
Patrick Millsaps
Millsaps was appointed to the state ethics commission in February 2009. He was chairman of the commission when it cut Kalberman’s pay from $125,000 to $85,000 and eliminated Streicker’s position. Millsaps resigned from the commission in November 2011 after a dispute arose about whether he had exceeded the legal amount of time on the commission. He later joined the presidential campaign of former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, eventually rising to the position of chief of staff of the campaign.
Chris Riley
Chief of staff to Gov. Nathan Deal and a founding member of HRPW Investments, a Gainesville partnership that owns an airplane. Deal’s private business, Gainesville Salvage & Disposal, also was a co-owner of the plane through its subsidiary, North Georgia Aviation. Riley later dropped out of the partnership but was the pilot of the plane when it carried Deal throughout the state during his successful 2010 campaign for governor.
Elisabeth Murray-Obertein
Murray-Obertein was a staff attorney with the ethics commission who claims that LaBerge intervened in Deal’s ethics case and repeatedly bragged of her relationship with the governor. She was recently fired after Capitol Police said they smelled alcohol on her breath on state property.
Robert Constantine
A former administrative law judge with the state Worker’s Compensation Board, Constantine was hired in December to help restore order and credibility at the commission. The AJC learned in January that he had been fired from the board after not meeting performance expectations. He was hired by the commission for a four-month period at $4,000 a month.
Timeline:
November 2010: Republican Nathan Deal elected governor
January-May 2011: The top two staff members of the state ethics commission, Executive Secretary Stacey Kalberman and her deputy, Sherilyn Streicker, open an investigation of the Deal campaign. They meet with federal prosecutors and the FBI concerning their inquiry. The two draw up subpoenas for Deal and others and prepare to serve them.
June 2011: Kalberman and Streicker are gone from their jobs. Streicker’s job is eliminated. Kalberman’s salary is cut from $120,000 to $85,000, and she resigns. The chairman of the ethics commission, Patrick Millsaps, says he needed to cut costs.
August 2011 Holly LaBerge, previously of the Public Defender Standards Counci, hired as new executive secretary of the state ethics commission.
June 2012: Kalberman and Streicker file separate whistle-blower lawsuits against the state.
July 23 2012: The state ethics commission clears Deal of major ethics violations while finding he made “technical defects” in a series of personal financial and campaign finance reports. Deal agrees to pay fees totaling $3,350.
September 2013: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that two staff members of the state ethics commission accused LaBerge of improperly intervening in the probe of Deal. Staff attorney Elisabeth Murray-Obertein and IT specialist John Hair made the accusations in sworn testimony taken as part of the whistleblower suits. Hair said LaBerge ordered him to destroy documents in the Deal file. Murray-Obertein said LaBerge bragged that Deal “owed” her for making his legal troubles go away. Deal denies wrongdoing.
Oct. 10, 2013: The AJC reports that the FBI has interviewed Murray-Obertein.
Oct. 22, 2013: State ethics commission votes to have the state auditor investigate the embattled agency.
Dec. 11, 2013: Federal investigators issue subpoenas to at least five current and former ethics commission staff members. They are seeking documents related to the Deal probe to present to a grand jury.
Dec. 19, 2013: In an effort to restore public confidence, the ethics commission votes unanimously to hire veteran lawyer Robert Constantine to oversee operations at the agency.
Jan. 6, 2013: Relying on personnel files obtained through an open records request, the AJC reports that Constantine was fired in August 2013 as a judge on the state board of workers compensation for “failure to meet performance expectations.”
February 2013: Deal and two top aides are supboened by Streicker and could testify in her lawsuit. A Fulton County Superior Court judge hears arguments on whether to allow Kalberman’s case to move forward but does not immediately issue a ruling.
The staff attorney is fired on suspicion that she was intoxicated on the job. The executive director is compelled to produce records by a federal grand jury. And it turns out the veteran lawyer brought in to right the ship was fired from his previous job for shoddy work and inappropriate behavior.
That’s been the order of business lately at Georgia’s ethics commission, the state agency charged with ensuring that politicians follow campaign finance laws.
And at every twist and turn – occasionally at center stage, more often just a shade too close to completely avoid notice – is the state’s top elected official, Gov. Nathan Deal. What might have been a simple, soon-forgotten reprimand for behavior during his days in Congress has – in part because of his staff’s subsequent actions — dogged Deal into his second run for governor.
More revelations could emerge this week, when proceedings may get underway in one of two lawsuits filed against the ethics commission by a pair of its former top leaders. They claim they were forced out because they looked too hard at alleged misdeeds by the governor.
Deal has denied that he or his aides engaged in wrongdoing. Although present and former commission staff members have been queried by the FBI and a federal grand jury, records don’t indicate that Deal or members of his team have been questioned in that probe. Last week, however, Deal and two key aides were subpoenaed in one of the whistleblower suits, which means the governor could have to testify under oath.
Deal spokesman Brian Robinson said, if called, the governor will testify but “he is not sure what pertinent information he would have in this civil case.”
Nearly five years after it began, the byzantine saga — with explosive allegations of document destruction and political payback — seems only to be gathering steam.
Political calculus
Whether it will rebound on Deal as he seeks re-election is an open question. He won the governor’s race in 2010 despite the original congressional ethics probe, and its reverberations appear to have left him unscathed. In a GOP-leaning state, with a $4 million war chest and the power of incumbency, his chances look good.
“So far, with everything I’ve seen, it doesn’t affect his re-election at all,” said Kennesaw State University political science professor and former GOP activist Kerwin Swint. “There doesn’t seem to be anything to tie him directly. It seems to be a problem of gross mismanagement at the ethics commission.”
Still, Deal’s camp has sought to have it both ways: jumping into the fray when it suits them; standing at arm’s length when it doesn’t.
With several ethics complaints pending against Deal, the governor’s executive counsel recruited Holly LaBerge to head the commission. But later, when LaBerge was accused in sworn testimony of boasting that she made the governor’s legal troubles go away, Deal disavowed any link.
Five years in the making
Any story that unfolds in fits and starts over five years, sucking in new characters and unfurling new tentacles as it goes, is tough to follow. This one is no exception.
It all traces back to a chilly, gray day in March, 2009. Deal, then a congressman, huddled with Georgia’s revenue commissioner, Bart Graham, in a small conference room in the state Capitol.
The topic was a plan to alter an obscure state vehicle inspection program in a way that would translate into less income for Deal’s Gainesville salvage yard.
The conversation quickly turned contentious. Graham later said he felt “hotboxed,” like a witness on the stand. Deal retorted that he was worried about vehicle safety, not his own financial bottom line.
Nevertheless, his behavior, and that of his longtime top aide, Chris Riley, spurred a congressional ethics investigation. Deal resigned from Congress before the probe was complete, but the panel issued a report saying it appeared that Deal had violated House rules governing the use of his public office for personal benefit.
The matter might have ended there, except for the hefty legal fees Deal had amassed to defend himself. In 2010, just as Deal was locked in a bitter battle for the Republican nomination for governor, the state ethics commission received a complaint that he had improperly used funds from his campaign to pay his legal bills.
A separate complaint alleged that he had not paid the correct amount in air travel costs for use of a private plane in which his company had been part owner.
Investigation interrupted
Stacey Kalberman, then the ethics commission’s chief executive, seemed an unlikely figure to end up at the center of a political melodrama. She had spent most of her legal career toiling in the trenches of insurance regulatory work.
But Kalberman was craving a change when, in 2010, she applied for and won the job of running the ethics commission.
“I was looking for something meaningful to contribute, and I thought, ‘This is my chance,’” Kalberman said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I really wanted to make a difference.”
One of her first moves was to hire Sherilyn Streicker, an assistant district attorney in Fulton County, as her No. 2. Some took that as a signal that the agency would take an aggressive stance.
Deal was sworn in as Georgia’s governor in January, 2011.
Quietly, meanwhile, on the 14th floor of the Sloppy Floyd building at the state Capitol, Kalberman and Streicker were digging into his campaign finances. At one point, they conferred with the FBI and the U.S. attorney, who offered help in various forms.
Kalberman and Streicker drew up subpoenas to compel the campaign to disclose certain records. But when they asked the appointed five-member ethics commission for permission to deliver the subpoenas, they met resistance on the grounds that a full-blown probe might be too costly.
“Before we jump into ANY grand campaign, I think we need to look at (the budget) more closely,” commission Chairman Patrick Millsaps wrote in an e-mail to Kalberman. “ … we can’t invade Iraq and Afghanistan unless we know we can afford it without getting ourselves into a quagmire.”
A fix or a fixer?
At about the same time, LaBerge, a legislative aide with the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, received a phone call from Ryan Teague, Deal’s executive counsel. Teague is a protege of GOP lawyer Randy Evans, who was fighting the ethics charges on the governor’s behalf.
“They asked if I would be interested in the position, and I said, ‘Yes, I would,’” LaBerge said in sworn testimony.
In June, 2011, in what was presented as a cost-cutting move, he ethics commissioners pushed Kalberman to eliminated Streicker’s job. They also cut her salary by 30 percent to $85,000. Kalberman later agreed to resign when it became clear she had lost authority with the commission.
Commissioners said they were under intense budget pressures, struggling to pay for postage for mailings to candidates. But Kalberman and Streicker saw it as retaliation for pushing too hard on the Deal probe. They filed lawsuits claiming wrongful termination.
LaBerge, who is not a lawyer, was hired as Kalberman’s replacement. She claims she entered an office in chaos, beset by sloppy budgeting. As for the subpoenas Kalberman and Streicker had drafted, she found them far too broad.
“A subpoena’s a fairly severe step,” she said in a deposition. “The first step is to ask nicely. I never needed a subpoena to get anything from Randy Evans.”
Less than a year after she took over, the commissioners — acting on information compiled by staff — voted to dismiss the most serious charges against Deal. The governor agreed to pay $3,350 in fees for technical defects in his campaign filings.
Riley — now Deal’s chief of staff — walked across the street from the Capitol to personally hand deliver the check, emails show, and that seemed to be the end of the matter.
Commission in chaos
That is, until Kalberman and Streicker’s lawsuits began to move forward.
In sworn testimony, the commission’s lead lawyer, Elisabeth Murray-Obertein, said LaBerge bragged that the governor “owed” her for making his legal troubles evaporate. A former IT staffer, John Hair, testified that LaBerge instructed him to remove documents from the Deal file, and that he did so before realizing he might be violating state law.
The AJC’s reporting on those statements provoked an angry denial from Deal, who questioned whether the newspaper was even worthy to be labelled a fish wrapper.
Nonetheless, the commission decided to have the state auditor conduct a review of the agency. The allegations also sparked the interest of federal investigators. The FBI has since interviewed key players at the ethics commission, and the federal grand jury has subpoenaed at least five of them to provide documents related to the probe.
Reeling from the steady thrum of revelations, the commission in December voted to hire an outside lawyer, Robert Constantine, to oversee the agency. The AJC revealed in January that Constantine had been fired from his post as a judge in workers compensation cases for failing to meet performance expectations.
No end in sight
More recently, documents obtained by the AJC through an open records request revealed the depth of his supervisor’s concerns about Constantine.
His performance review from the state Workers Compensation Board said he “lacks a basic ‘awareness’ of what he is doing” and “has not demonstrated the ability to handle complex legal issues.”
“Additionally, he has done and said some things that make the staff feel ill at ease — and which call into question his understanding of basic 2012 office etiquette,” the reviewer added.
In yet one more bizarre development, on Jan. 28 Murray-Obertein – the commission lawyer who testified that LaBerge had bragged of doing Deal political favors – was fired after Capitol Police said they smelled alcohol on her breath on state property.
Perhaps no one except the players has followed the commission’s convulsions more closely than William Perry, the president of Common Cause Georgia. The steady string of twists and turns has left him aghast.
“And we’re not even at a point where we can even start to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Perry told the AJC.
“It’s our hope that the Legislature will make some moves toward creating a more independent ethics commission, which will distance the body from politics and help prevent messes like they are in now.”
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