Gov. Bev’s Problem With The Truth
The problem mainly being that she keeps getting tripped up by it; not that anybody like the State Board of Elections seems to care. Perdue’s high-flying campaign was fined all of $30,000 this week for failing to report as donations 42 flights on private planes during her 2008 gubernatorial run.
This after a newly released and amended report from the elections board’s lead investigator, charged with looking into Perdue’s campaign, showed that campaign to have been sitting for months on critical and damning information that completely refuted Perdue’s assertion that the unreported flights were innocent mistakes caused by sloppy record-keeping.
Turns out the record-keeping wasn’t so sloppy, just Perdue’s attempts to hide the truth from the public, according to this report from the Raleigh News & Observer:
A computer spreadsheet released to state investigators last week shows that Gov. Bev Perdue’s staff kept detailed records on private aircraft flights provided by her supporters, according to a report sent Saturday to members of the State Board of Elections.
After Perdue’s 2008 gubernatorial campaign failed to report 41 such flights until last year, her staff blamed the lapse on poor record-keeping.
But the new investigative report appears to undercut that explanation, showing that Perdue’s staff had a detailed process in place for tracking her travel as far back as 2005. Perdue, a Democrat then serving as lieutenant governor, was gearing up to run for the state’s top elected job.
Throughout the elections board’s nearly year-long investigation of the unreported flights, Perdue’s campaign never turned over a copy of the spreadsheet for tracking those flights until after investigators independently learned of its existence through interviews with, among others, Perdue’s campaign manager, Zach Ambrose.
That would be the same Zach Ambrose that the lead investigator, Kim Starch, was never given an opportunity to interview before issuing her original report on Perdue’s hinky flights. Starch’s superiors at the State Board of Elections, Perdue cronies one and all, had heavily edited her original report to remove any reference to Perdue staffers, including Ambrose, that Startch had not been given the chance to interview.
Even after the latest developments and the wrist-slap fine imposed by the elections board, Perdue’s campaign remains wholly unrepentant and still at odds with that nasty little thing called the truth. This from the N&O:
“The campaign did a lousy job of tracking flights,” [Perdue campaign spokesman Marc] Farinella said. “It’s not that the data didn’t exist. It wasn’t in the right places, in the hands of the right people. Too much stuff fell through the cracks.”
Asked why the spreadsheet documenting the flights was not turned over until last week, he said that investigators had not requested it.
“We’ve been completely forthcoming,” Farinella said. “The notion there was some effort to intentionally not report flights is baloney.”
These people are shameless.
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