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.
A former state ethics commission computer specialist claims in a new whistleblower lawsuit that he was fired after he refused to alter and destroy documents related to an investigation into Gov. Nathan Deal’s 2010 campaign.
John Hair, former commission director Stacey Kalberman and former deputy director Sherilyn Streicker have all sued the state claiming they lost their jobs in connection with the Deal case.
Kalberman and Streicker in 2011 had been investigating a series of accusations that Deal financially benefited from campaign expenditures, that he improperly used a campaign account to pay legal fees and that he improperly reported some expenditures on his disclosures.
Shortly after they presented proposed subpoenas to the commission in May 2011, Streicker’s job was eliminated and Kalberman was told her salary would be slashed. Kalberman resigned the next month. Commissioners blamed the job changes on budget cuts.
Deal was cleared of major ethics charges in 2012 and agreed to pay $3,350 in fees for technical defects in his campaign finance reports.
The Kalberman and Streicker cases are set for trial this spring in Fulton County Superior Court. Hair’s lawsuit also was filed in that court.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last year that Hair and former commission attorney Elisabeth Murray-Obertein claimed that Kalberman’s successor, Holly LaBerge, bragged that the governor “owed her” for scuttling the Deal case and that she ordered documents destroyed or removed from the case file.
LaBerge has said neither accusation is true, and Deal said he didn’t know LaBerge, much less owe her anything.
Commission Chairman Kevin Abernethy on Tuesday referred questions to Attorney General Sam Olens’ office. A spokeswoman for Olens declined comment. Hair’s attorney, Kim Worth, also declined to comment. Worth also represents Kalberman.
Hair joined the commission after LaBerge. In his suit, Hair says he was ordered to place documents pertaining to the Deal investigation onto a flash drive and that a commission printer would be used to send them to LaBerge’s personal email account. The goal, according to the suit, was to keep the emails out of the public eye and away from the media.
Hair said this happened several times, but that it was always for the Deal investigation or the Kalberman and Streicker lawsuits — never any other case.
“They were asking me to manipulate records, plain and simple. Deleting information. I was asked to go onto the network and pull a certain document,” Hair told the AJC in October. “They had me remove documents under the case file under the understanding that I would receive documents to replace it. And I never did.”
Deal’s attorney said the only documents that might have been removed were extraneous files or documents that contained private information, such as Social Security numbers. Olens’ office, too, said the commission said no documents were taken from the file.
According to his lawsuit, shortly after refusing an order to remove or alter more documents, Hair said LaBerge cursed at him and began to take steps to fire him, including accusing him of viewing pornographic materials on a state computer during work. Hair denied the charge and said the commission’s human resources director found no evidence to back LaBerge’s charges.
Hair was fired April 1 for missing a deadline, according to his personnel file, obtained by the AJC through the Open Records Act. The file, however, also shows Hair was warned in September 2012 that he need to improve his performance.
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