Friday, June 17, 2011
Guv'ment Soon-to-be-former ethics official says exit was related to Deal probe, subpoenas
Posted by Thomas Wheatley @thomaswheatley on Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:56 PM
Keep your eyes on the state ethics commission — the General Assembly last year changed its name to the ridiculous-sounding Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission — as major changes are afoot.
Stacey Kalberman, who until this week led the state agency that monitors campaign finance and investigates complaints about elected officials, officially resigned today. Her exit follows a leaked e-mail in which she claimed the commission's board chairman pushed back against a probe she launched over Gov. Nathan Deal. James Salzer and Aaron Gould Sheinin have the story, which needs to be read in its entirety, Xeroxed, and hand-delivered to every man, woman and toddler in the state:
In an email obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Stacey Kalberman, the commission’s executive secretary, linked the decision to eliminate her assistant’s job and deeply cut her own salary to their requests for subpoenas against the governor’s campaign. She also revealed in that email to Patrick Millsaps, chairman of the ethics commission, that the state attorney general’s office reviewed their work and that the FBI offered to assist in the ethics investigation. [...]The complaints question how Deal paid for airfare for the campaign, whether he improperly used state campaign funds for legal bills related to a federal ethics investigation and whether he improperly accepted campaign contributions that exceed limits.
But on Tuesday, the same day The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the looming staff shake-up, Kalberman said she was contacted by someone in the governor’s office “to assist me in finding a job.”
Millsaps denies the link between the Deal — who appointed him to the ethics commission board — and Kalberman's exit. It was all a matter of budgets, he told Salzer and Sheinin. And a Deal spokeswoman told the reporters the governor was just trying to "reach out" and help the former ethics director.
Milsaps and Kalberman, who'll help the agency transition, reportedly put on happy faces at today's ethics commission meeting. (Jay Bookman has an entertaining read of the event.) But we doubt this brouhaha is over.
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