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LeVota Responds
July 10, 2010
By Phil LeVota
The investigation of a two year old municipal election is something the Missouri Ethics Commission never initiates on its own, but did in this case. The action was a politically motivated investigation where my campaign was treated entirely different than any other campaign committee. The result is a settlement and consent agreement where my campaign agreed that it had not met technical requirements like time frame of filing and proper completion of the forms. There was never any allegation of misuse of funds or campaign finance problems, only technical violations of filing time frames and classifications of finances.
It is unfortunate that the Missouri Ethics Commission allows every other campaign to simply update and amend records, but they refused to treat this committee in the similar manner as all other candidates. Further disappointing is when they assigned the case to an outside private counsel to find every single technical violation they could, like a missing address, and claim it as a violation. In an effort to resolve the issue before going to a hearing, I agreed to an amount to be paid and agreed that the campaign was not as knowledgeable as it should have been to fill out the forms exactly right.
From the beginning of the process, I clearly understood my committee would not get a fair shake because the Chairman of the Ethics Commission that ordered this investigation is the same person whose own law firm donated $20,000 against me in this exact election. The simple facts show that the process was an abuse of authority by the Missouri Ethics Commission. I certainly take responsibility for not filing forms on time and other technical violations and agreed to pay a fine for those even though the manner and process of the complaint was completed in an unsavory way by the Missouri Ethics Commission. As a career prosecutor and attorney, I have always believed and followed the idea that the system must be fair and objective in any proceeding. Anyone that does more than just glance at this story will see that this was not a fair and objective proceeding and that there is a big ethical problem inside the Missouri Ethics Commission itself. It is unfortunate that the agency that is supposed to be our political watchdog can target specific committees without public complaint and utilize the system for political vendettas.
http://www.mec.mo.gov/EthicsWeb/Compliance/Compliance_CASearch.aspx
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