Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Former Top A&I Employees Say They Guaranteed McMahan Campaign Loan In October 2002; Scott Admits Introducing McMahan To Bank Officials


SECOND IN A SERIES ~ Two former top employees in the state auditor & inspector's office have told The McCarville Report Online they each signed $2,000 promissory notes for a Shawnee bank in October 2002 to secure a last-minute $20,000 campaign loan for Jeff McMahan, then locked in a close election battle with Republican Gary Jones.
The two former employees asked that they not be identified for the time being. They were interviewed at separate times, each unaware of the other's recollection of events.
One of them recalled that six or eight of the top employees in then-Auditor & Inspector Clifton Scott's office were called to a meeting in Room 100 at the State Capitol; that is one of the auditor's offices in the building. He said they were presented with $2,000 promissory notes to BancFirst in Shawnee and asked to sign them to secure the campaign loan for McMahan. At the time, he said, polls had shown McMahan in a close race with Jones and McMahan's campaign was out of money and needed the loan to finance a last-minute advertising buy, mostly on radio stations. He said he signed the promissory note put in front of him. Asked why he did so, he said, "Well...it was so sudden, no time to really think, but I was sorta concerned about my job the way it was done." Asked if it occurred to him that such an action might be prohibited by Oklahoma law, he said, "Not at the time." He said his recollection of the meeting is that Scott was there and asked him and the others to sign the promissory notes. He said he worked in Scott's office for more than two decades and this was the first time he had ever been approached about a campaign. He said during his years in the office, he never felt pressured to donate to Scott's campaigns and that there was no effort within the office to collect donations from employees and that Scott himself had made it plain that he didn't expect donations to be made. He said he did donate to Scott's campaigns, and attended fundraisers, because he believed in Scott and his work as auditor. Asked if he was surprised when asked to sign the promissory note for McMahan's campaign, he said, "Yes. It was so...just unusual...it was a big surprise." Asked if the climate in the auditor's office changed after McMahan became a candidate, he said, "Yes...Jeff is more aggressive in asking (for campaign donations)." Asked why McMahan didn't take out the loan himself, he said, "I guess he couldn't. I was told he owned no property and the bank wouldn't give him that much on his signature alone. So, he needed some guarantees."
Scott, who now heads the Oklahoma School Land Commission, told Oklahoma City radio station KTOK's this morning that he did introduce McMahan to officials at the Shawnee bank and told him about a 1982 campaign in which supporters signed promissory notes to secure a loan. Asked if he was present at a meeting in his office where the promissory notes were signed, Scott said, "It never happened" that he was at any such meeting. Scott also said that allegations of state property use in McMahan's campaign, and employees soliciting donations on state time, as reported Monday, did not occur with his knowledge. He said if anything like that had happened and he knew about it, he would have stopped it. The allegations came from Dana Webb, former district manager of the auditor's Tulsa office who worked for Scott for 12-1/2 years. She was fired in January 2003, she said, because she did not support McMahan in the 2002 election. For Scott's full comments, tune to NewsRadio 1000 KTOK.
A current employee in one of the auditor's Oklahoma City offices told TMRO this morning that Scott was not aware of the campaign activities being carried out in the field offices by McMahan supporters: "He didn't have a clue," the employee said. "This was done by Jeff's big supporters (on the staff)."
The second former employee recalls being told by Scott, "We've got to help Jeff." He said McMahan had been Scott's "right-hand guy" for more than a decade and since they lived close to each other in Pottawatomie County, often rode to the Capitol together. "They were really tight," he added. He does not recall McMahan or Scott being present when the loan documents were put on the table in front of the group called to the meeting; it is his recollection that there were eight to nine employees at the meeting. Asked if he was surprised at being asked to sign the promissory note, he said, "I was. Stunned, I guess. I'd just never seen anything like this." He said Scott had made an effort to keep politics out of the auditor's office and often said "Let the chips fall where they may" when any question about the political ramifications of audits or other actions was raised. Asked to summarize his feelings about the incident now, he said, "Just disappointed, I guess, in Clif. He's such a super guy. I think he just got carried away with trying to help McMahan."
Both said they never heard a word, after the meeting, about the loan documents they'd signed, so they both presumed the loan had been repaid by McMahan's campaign after the election.
McMahan's 2002 campaign finance reports show a $20,000 loan from "Jeff & Lori McMahan" on October 18, 2002. The loan was repaid in early 2003.
State law cited in the Ethics Commission Manual includes numerous passages that prohibit the coercion of state employees to donate to campaigns, describe a guarantee of a loan as a campaign contribution, and prohibits the solicitation, verbally or in writing, "in a facility ordinarily used for the conduct of state government business a contribution from a state employee." State law specifically defines a contributor to include the "guarantee or forgiveness of a loan" and states, "A loan is considered a contribution from the...guarantor...."
Neither one of the two former employees who say they signed the promissory notes to guarantee McMahan's loan are listed as donors of $2,000 each on his 2002 campaign reports. Both are, however, listed as donors of much smaller amounts in the period from April 1st, 2003 to August 10th, 2006.
Wednesday In Part III: More revelations from McMahan's campaign finance reports.

Labels: , ,

Share |