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Appointing versus Electing the Attorney General

March 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Senator wants Utah to look at appointing attorney general The Salt Lake TribuneTo avoid the influence of cash on Utah’s chief law enforcement office, Senator Todd Weiler wants the legislature to look into amending the Utah  constitution to allow for an appointed attorney general. With Utah’s long history of flawed AGs, perhaps it’s an idea we should take seriously.

 

During the Utah Legislative Session, ended last week, members of the legislature were largely taciturn on the Swallow scandal, preferring to reserve judgement until the FBI investigation into Swallow wraps and the facts are clear. Regardless, the legislature passed two pieces of legislation addressing, if indirectly, the Swallow scandal.

The first, Senate Bill 83 sponsored by Senator Todd Weiler, addressed employees of the Utah Attorney General’s office accepting outside consulting work–as Swallow has said he did for a Nevada cement project.

The second bill, pushed through on the last day of the session, though with none of the opposition that other last minutes bills have seen in the past, was Senator Peter Knudson’s Senate Bill 289. It aimed to move investigatory power from the Attorney General to the Lieutenant Governor when elections complaints were filed against the AG. While prompted by the Alliance for a Better Utah complaint about Swallow to the Lieutenant Governor’s office, both legislators and staffers went to lengths to point out that the bill was to remove a weakness in the law, not target Swallow.ada cement project after appointment by then Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.

Appointment by Supreme Court or Governor is a good idea

money-and-justice-scalesEven with these two changes in the law–one putting the same restrictions on political appointees as exist on state employees and the other preventing the AG from investigating himself–Weiler believes further changes may be necessary to avoid a repeat of the same problems.

“The discussion is: As an elected official in a statewide race, we’re asking these candidates to run around and ask people for political donations,” Weiler said to the Salt Lake Tribune. “If someone was appointed, we’d take that entirely out of the process. We wouldn’t have the chief law enforcement officer asking people for money.”

In an 2011 proposal for the same, State Senator Steve Urquhart  said that it could get better attorneys into the AG’s office:

“[...] maybe we would get a better-qualified attorney than we tend to get and we might get an attorney with an approach that is consistently on the merits of the issues rather than on the basis of politics or something else.”

Currently, only seven states have appointed attorney generals. The Salt Lake Tribune lists those states as Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Tennessee and Wyoming, citing the National Association of Attorney Generals.

6TXZ_Sup_Ct_Lg

In Tennessee, the state Supreme Court appoints the attorney general, which I find particularly interesting, especially given how Utah’s justices join the bench. Unlike many states, Utah’s Supreme Court justices are not elected but serve ten-year renewable terms after appointment by the governor and confirmation by the state senate. As result, Utah’s Supreme Court has avoided much of the politicization that plagues other states. Not beholden to campaign donations, Utah tends to have justices who are better known for the legal acumen than their political connections.

This kind of process can prove useful for an AG appointment in two ways:

  1. Appointment by the Governor: similar to selection for the Utah Supreme Court, selection of the AG would be based on merit and subject to an “advise and consent” process by the state senate. The process could be further depoliticized by including a vetting process by the Utah Bar Association.
  2. Appointment by the Supreme Court: already less beholden by virtue of their appointment and independence as a separate branch of government, an appointment by the Supreme Court would carry additional levels of review and detachment from the political process, allowing selection of a person without need of review of political bona fides.

There’s no way that politics will be completely removed from the process, but an appointment–either by the governor with consent of the senate or by the Supreme Court–would remove the politics from the Utah Attorney General’s office.

 Swallow opposes, makes “Bandwagon” argument

SwallowNot surprisingly, Swallow, with nothing to fall back upon if he loses his job, does not support the idea. To the Salt Lake Tribune

“The attorney general is the guardian of the public interest and should be independent and provide legal advice based on the law instead of political pressure,” Swallow said. “Utah is one of 43 states where the attorney general is elected by popular vote and this process ensures the attorney general is the lawyer for all Utah citizens.”

 

In case you missed that, Swallow implied that there’s less political pressure on someone who needs to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to get elected (as he did) than there is on someone who is appointed. (Swallow also wins Logical Fallacy of the Day with his “Bandwagon” appeal to popularity as a validation of his position).

Not the first time…

220px-Mark_ShurtleffAs I noted earlier, this isn’t the first time that someone has suggested we look at moving to appointment of the AG. Given Shurtleff’s history.  Urquhart proposed looking into the idea in 2011.

“I also think it’s much cleaner if the guy making prosecutorial decisions isn’t out soliciting money from people who could be impacted by those decisions,” Urquhart said in a Salt Lake Tribune article at the time.

Then Attorney General Mark Shurtleff opposed the idea, touting the independence that comes with election. Of course, he had his own problems. During his term, Shurtleff was regularly pilloried by the City Weekly for receiving contributions from questionable donors, including the same ones who helped get Swallow elected and some of which are now under federal investigation.

Paul Rolly has also in his column told a short history of Utah’s attorney generals, and few escape some kind of scandal. With Utah’s history, perhaps it is time we change how we think about the office of the attorney general. It’s cliche to talk about lawyers,politicians, sharks, snakes and leeches in the same breath, but do we need to add to the taint of corruption and make the cliche real?

In 1998, the Utah Supreme Court was moved into...

In 1998, the Utah Supreme Court was moved into the Scott M. Matheson Courthouse building. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like Weiler’s request, echoing Urquhart’s suggestion in years past, that the legislature look into changing the Utah constitution to provide for a more independent attorney general uncorrupted by the taint of political contributions. Utahns should be able to look to their attorney general as their advocate, regardless of whether they have been able to donate to his campaign.

Swallow has been accused by three businessmen of soliciting donations in return for protection. Regardless of the truth of the accusations, changing the nature of the selection of the attorney general would remove the possibility that prosecutorial decisions are tainted by money.

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A Special Counsel to Investigate Swallow?

March 14, 2013 by 1 Comment

Utah Legislature set to move authority for a special counsel to LG

Utah CapitolWith the last day of the Utah Legislative Session upon us, Utah’s representatives are set to finally take action to directly investigate the allegation against Utah Attorney General John Swallow.

In Senate Bill 289, introduced by Senator Pete Knudson, the legislature would grant authority to the Lieutenant Governor to appoint special counsel to investigate elections offenses if the Attorney General has a conflict of interest in a complaint.   Under section 4 of the bill, the authority granted to the Lieutenant Governor would be retroactive to March 1, 2013 and would include the complaint filed by Crystal Young-Otterstrom and Maryann Martindale of Alliance for a Better Utah, a left leaning activist group.

Normally, complaints would go directly to the Attorney General’s office and while the Lieutenant Governor’s office has not yet completed its review of the complaint, addressing the conflict in the law during the session is prudent.

“We have no indication from the lieutenant governor about where the complaint is in the process,” said House Speaker Becky Lockhart to the Salt Lake Tribune. “All we know is he approached us and mentioned this complication in the statute that we were unaware of.”

Up to Speed on Swallow

Swallow

The Salt Lake Tribune sums up the complaint that led to this change:

The complaint includes an allegation that Swallow attempted to conceal his interest in P-Solutions and payments from Richard Rawle, the late founder of the payday lender Check City.

When Swallow filed to run for office on March 9, 2012, he did not list several companies in which he was an officer at the time. He filed an amended return on March 15, the same day he took his name off of several companies, transferring his interests to his wife.

That includes P-Solutions, a company that received $23,500 from Rawle for consulting work on a Nevada limestone quarry, part of a planned cement project.

The money Swallow was paid came from funds St. George business owner Jeremy Johnson paid to Rawle. Swallow had put Johnson in touch with Rawle, Swallow and Rawle insist, to hire lobbyists to help him avoid a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit. Johnson said he and Rawle arranged to pay Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., $600,000, which Johnson has called a bribe.

Reid has denied any knowledge of Johnson’s case.

Swallow’s conduct is the subject of a federal investigation and prompted calls for ethics reform in the Legislature. Democrats have also asked the governor to appoint a special investigator to determine if Swallow violated any state laws.

This is not the first time that Swallow has run afoul of the law, though it is the first time a federal investigation has been announced. You can learn more about Swallow’s colored past here, here, and here. They include accounts of Swallow offering access to his office in return for donations, fluffing claims about his involvement in Obamacare litigation, and alleged investigation by the FBI for interference in municipal contracting.

 

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Swallow swallows his words and Powers’ memory gets less “hazy”

February 13, 2013 by 3 Comments

SwallowEvery week seems to bring a new revelation about John Swallow’s pre-election activities. His supporters (all three of them) keep saying to wait until the evidence gets out, but the way I see it, it’s only getting worse. I don’t know how you explain it all away.

Forget about the facts. Never mind claims that  Swallow tried to help an indicted businessman “influence” a U.S. Senator with $600,000, that former AG Mark Shurtleff asked the feds to investigate Swallow, that the Tribune, the Daily Herald, and the Spectrum have called for Swallow’s resignation, or that 49% of voters want resignation.

Forget all that. Swallow can’t swallow the words that he’s spoken, the words that indicate that he wasn’t walking the straight and narrow in his run for public office.

He was trying to keep stuff out of the public eye, whether by changing ownership of his companies or by hiding his activities.

To Jeremy Johnson, a large contributor to his and Shurtleff’s campaigns under investigation for scamming consumers, Swallow said:

There’s nothing wrong with anything that I’ve done criminally. Now, politically, politically, I go, whoa.

Why the “whoa”? Could it be due to the fact that he’s taking money from people he could or should be prosecuting? Hanging out on their million dollar boats? Flying around on their jets?

But there’s been no evidence of that–

THIS JUST IN…THE  TRIBUNE REPORTS THAT THREE BUSINESSMEN ACCUSE SWALLOW OF OFFERING LEGAL PROTECTION IF THEY CONTRIBUTE…DEVELOPING…

Ok, so maybe there is evidence of Swallow taking money from people he should be prosecuting.  The three spoke to the Salt Lake Tribune, each  independently of the others. Combined, the three donated $50,000 to the Shurtleff campaign war chest when Swallow was Shurtleff’s fundraiser. Two of the three have been interviewed by the FBI.

“Essentially, what we were told was: ‘Look, at the end of the day, we want to know who you guys are, because if someone gives us a complaint or calls us from another agency. … We want to be able to head it off at that level,’ ” one of the businessmen recalls Swallow saying.

If it were coming from the mafia, we would call that “protection money.” In Utah, or rather in the Attorney General’s office, they call that “campaign contributions.”

“We now had a friend at the highest level of Utah law enforcement,” one donor said.  In case you were wondering, Utah law does not allow the solicitation of campaign funds with the promise of any official action.

“[P]olitically, I go, whoa.” Well, yes, John:  we’re all going “whoa” now.

 Powers’ “hazy” memory becomes less hazy. 

JCPIn response, Swallow sent his campaign adviser, Jason Powers, to respond. By email. (It’s safer that way, you know? No accidentally getting recorded saying something “politically” whoa-worthy on the record).   Powers was unequivocal:

“The campaign is not going to speculate on these absurd accusations by anonymous sources,” Jason Powers said in an email Tuesday night. “However, I’ve been eyewitness to hundreds of fundraising meetings and phone calls by Mark Shurtleff and John Swallow. I’ve never heard either of them say anything like that. In fact, I’ve heard them stress the opposite, that a donation does not get you any special treatment.”

In contrast to his memory of those hundreds of meetings and phone calls, the last time Powers’ was asked about a meeting Swallow attended, his memory was “hazy.”

While he was in jail, Johnson said, Swallow worried Johnson was cutting a deal with federal prosecutors. Just after Johnson’s release, and with Swallow a candidate for attorney general, Johnson said Swallow and his campaign consultant, Jason Powers, met him at a St. George hotel, where Johnson said he again pressured Swallow to come up with the money.

Powers said his memory about the meeting is hazy, but he recalls the atmosphere as being cordial and remembers discussion of a meeting with Rawle that Johnson claimed Swallow attended, but Swallow said he had not. According to Powers, Johnson agreed.

You know how memory is, though; you can never recall exactly what you need when you need it. Apparently, the meeting with Johnson, out on $2.8 million bail after he tried to flee the country to South America, just didn’t merit retention, while those hundreds of routine fundraising phone calls and meetings do. What will Powers remember next? Or forget?

 

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With Public Polls Favoring His Resignation, Swallow’s Case is Murky

February 1, 2013 by 2 Comments

SwallowThe news about John Swallow seems to get progressively worse.  His behavior may not have been illegal, but it skirts the line of what the public expects from elected officials enough that a plurality supports his resignation. Though none of the headlines this week has landed with the bombshell effect of that first story in the Salt Lake Tribune, every new revelation seems to further diminish the reputation of Utah’s Attorney General.

 

Investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice

Nearly two weeks after the Salt Lake Tribune broke the story, with calls for Swallow’s resignation in the air, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Utah acknowledged that Swallow was under investigation by the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Neither the DOJ nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office typically confirms investigations, but an exception was made “because of the extraordinary public interest in this matter, we want to reassure the public that we, along with the FBI, have been investigating the allegations and will follow the facts and the law in doing so,” according to the statement.

The Money Trail

Photo Gallery Money trail in John Swallow saga leads to friend of Sen. Harry Reid The Salt Lake Tribune

Johnson has alleged that Swallow offered to help him pay off Reid to stop an FTC investigation into Johnson’s business. On Sunday, the Salt Lake Tribune’s Tom Harvey sketched the path Johnson’s money took, and it’s an article worth reading.

Jeremy Johnson

Jeremy Johnson

Especially interesting is the intended recipient of the money, Jay Brown, a Las Vegas attorney and friend of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. About Brown’s firm, the Tribune wrote that

The firm is not registered to lobby either Congress or the administrative branch. Jay Brown was registered as a lobbyist in 2010-11 for Caesers Entertainment Corp. on the issue of Internet gambling, a topic Reid has been actively involved in for several years. Brown also lobbied for a payday-loan industry trade group called the Community Financial Services Association in 2011-12, though the RMR payment to the Brown firm likely was made in December 2010. Rawle sat on the group’s board before his death.

Brown also has deep personal and business ties to Reid. In the senator’s 2009 autobiography, The Good Fight, Reid calls Brown a “longtime friend,” with the families close to the point that their kids frequently played with one another growing up. Their youngest children, Key Reid and David Brown, became best friends, the book says.

460xA close relationship between Reid and Brown is one thing, but it gets more interesting when similarities between Brown and Swallow appear. Apparently, Brown has been investigated by the FBI, as well.

The Associated Press reported in 2006 that Reid and Jay Brown engaged in questionable land deals in Nevada in which Reid earned $1.1 million on a $400,000 investment that probably violated Senate ethics rules when the Nevada Democrat failed to report his interest in the sale.

In addition, the Las Vegas Review-Journal quoted a retired FBI agent as saying Jay Brown has been a “person of interest” in separate investigations of organized crime.

“I think if you know Brown, you will have an inside track to Reid,” said Steve Miller, a former Las Vegas city councilman who now writes columns on organized crime and has written about the Brown-Reid relationship.

An odd association of individuals for Swallow to be associating with, let alone suggesting that money be routed to.

But is any of this illegal or unethical? Or does it demonstrate poor judgement?

 

Illegal? Unethical? Or just plain foolish?

When one listens to the secret recording as then Assistant Attorney General Swallow sat in an Orem donut shop talking to Johnson, it’s easy to see that there are problems here. Swallow recognizes that danger lurks in his association with this individual, as well as what the ramifications might be if the details of their relationship were publicized.  What is unclear is whether Swallow ever intended to break the law or if he had merely chosen to help out the wrong guy.  By his account, Swallow insists that he only wanted to help Johnson successfully lobby Senator Reid.

And perhaps that’s accurate. In the secret recording, it sounds like Johnson may be trying to draw Swallow out, while Swallow seems to insist that he’s only trying to help with lobbying.

“I think you may have the wrong idea,” Swallow tells Johnson at one point, adding, “I don’t know what the arrangement is, but I think, I think that they have lobbyists they pay on retainer.”

Johnson and his business associate paid Rawle $250,000.

Further, mails from 2010 show Swallow saying that

“Richard [Rawle, the individual who would arrange for the lobbyist] is traveling to LV tomorrow and will be able to contact this person, who he has a very good relationship with. He needs a brief narrative of what is going on and what you want to happen. I don’t know the cost, but it won’t be cheap,” Swallow wrote.

At this point, though, the story is a case of “he said/he said,” with Johnson’s claims that Swallow “shook him down” for money hanging in the air against the Attorney General’s claims of innocence.

Johnson says Swallow spoke with him several times about the price for such assistance, starting at more than one million dollars and negotiating down to $600,000. Even at that, Johnson says he could only scrape up $250,000, which he gave to Richard Rawle.

Over the course of the conversations, Johnson says he told Swallow paying Rawle would take all the money he had for a defense attorney, ”and his exact words were ‘trust me Jeremy, this is better than an attorney. You won’t need an attorney.’”

When the FTC sued I Works, beginning a fast process of shutting down the St. George-based company, Johnson says he went to Swallow and, again, the two talked money.

“I’m like, ‘John, I don’t understand,’ you know and then the talk started to turn to like, ‘You know Jeremy, you knew the deal, it was six hundred and you didn’t pay the whole amount.’”

With a federal indictment against him, Johnson’s motives in attacking Swallow are suspect at best, but the evidence he brings against Swallow remains. Further, revelations this week indicate that Swallow may have been closer to Johnson than he previously admitted, even going so far as to accept gifts from Johnson that may possibly run afoul of the law.

On the secret recordings, Swallow expresses anxiety about his use of Johnson’s million dollar house boat at Lake Powell.

“Do they know about the houseboat?” Swallow asks in the April 30, 2012, meeting that Johnson secretly recorded. “Is there any paper trail on that?”

“There’s no paper trail on the houseboat. Nobody knows about it,” Johnson assures him.

“There’s no email, there’s no … ” Swallow continues before Johnson interrupts.

“No emails on the thing,” Johnson reiterates, “and, no, my wife doesn’t even know you were on there.”

Swallow, then a candidate for Utah attorney general who assumed that office earlier this month, has acknowledged using the houseboat, “Peps I,” a 75-foot-long floating mansion with numerous cabins, a home theater and a helipad — from which Johnson can be seen in a YouTube video taking off in his copter.

Why would Swallow care about the boat, or anyone knowing that Swallow and his family had used it?  State law prohibits officers–including then Assistant Attorney General Swallow–from accepting gifts from parties on which they may have to take action.  According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the “attorney general’s office has sole authority to file class-action suits on behalf of citizens who have been defrauded. The state law parallels the federal one that the FTC cited when it sued Johnson in December 2010, a few months after Swallow used Johnson’s houseboat.”

In other words, Swallow was accepting gifts from Johnson, a person who was under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission for something that the Utah Attorney General’s office could have, or maybe should have, been investigating.   While state law allows such gifts if disclosed, the gifts were not disclosed, and as Swallow demonstrates in this recording, he did not seem to want it disclosed.

Illegal? Unethical? Or just incredibly foolish?

Meanwhile, The Public Is Not Impressed

Swallow-Figure-3-550x374

US Kayla Mc Maroney poses with her silveWhether Swallow’s behavior was illegal or not, the public is doing a Kayla Maroney on Swallow’s behavior. A recent poll by BYU’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy showed that at least 58% believed his behavior was either illegal or, if not illegal, unethical, while 49% believe he should resign. Only 34% are confident that he should remain in office.

That’s an awkward way to start one’s term as Attorney General.

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Where there’s smoke: a brief history of John Swallow in headlines

January 17, 2013 by 10 Comments

John Swallow has a habit of making newspaper headlines, but for all the wrong reasons. If it’s true that where there is smoke there’s usually fire, then the headlines that have followed Swallow’s career indicate a lot of fire. Only time will tell how much or if it will catch up to Swallow this time around.

With calls for his resignation already circulating—the Daily Herald in Utah County called for Swallow to step down on Sunday and the Salt Lake Tribune and the St. George Spectrum followed—maybe it’s time to talk a walk down memory lane and recall that this isn’t his first time running afoul of the appearance of ethical behavior.

“SWALLOW DENIES ETHICS BREACHES”

Elected to serve in the state legislature for the first time in 1995, Swallow served three terms in the state legislature before stepping down in 2002 to run for Congress. Over the next two election cycles, Swallow challenged Jim Matheson to represent Utah’s Second Congressional District, falling short each time. It was during this time that Swallow was hit by accusations of questionable ethics.

With the election fast approaching and the Swallow campaign hoping to look good for national Republicans, Swallow found his campaign short on cash.

“That wouldn’t look good,” said Dave Hansen, former campaign manager for Orrin Hatch, was at the time working as Swallow’s campaign manager. “So John said he could loan the campaign $90,000, which would look good on the report’s cash-on-hand, and when the October campaign contributions started coming in, the campaign would repay that. And that’s exactly what we did. That money was never meant for the campaign and actually wasn’t spent on the campaign. To be honest, it was just to make the report look good.”

It’s not atypical for candidates to do this kind of thing, but the question that was left outstanding was: Where did Swallow get the money? While Rob Bishop borrowed money from a credit union during the same cycle to keep the campaign moving, Swallow allegedly sold artwork that he never reported owning in previous financial reports.

“It was all within my immediate family,” said Swallow. “And all legal and above board.”

With the source questionable, and the amount much higher than what Swallow had reported as his own personal assets just six months before, the headline in the Deseret News was glaring: SWALLOW DENIES ETHICS BREACHES. Swallow was later cleared of breaking the law when he admitted selling some paintings, cashing out checking and savings accounts, including an individual retirement account, to make the loans to his campaign.

With just a little bit of political sleight of hand, Swallow leveraged his assets to hide the state of his campaign until after the election.

Tricky, but, at least according to the FEC, legal.

 

SWALLOW EXAGGERATED HIS ROLE IN THE OBAMACARE LAWSUIT

During the run up to the Republican primary in 2012, Swallow painted himself at the forefront of the Obama Care lawsuit…or at least, his mailers did. In reality, the most Swallow did for the case was listen in on a few conference calls and attend oral arguments in a seat that he probably paid someone to stand in line for. Then, he took a taxpayer funded trip to DC to watch other lawyers argue the case and called home to his state to campaign on their coattails.

[…]Swallow was there…along with four hundred others, including attorneys from twenty-six states who were also on the lawsuit and observing the oral arguments that day.  Other than that, I could not find anything to indicate a more active role in the case. Other lawyers argued, other lawyers filed the briefs, and other lawyers responded to the judges questions.

Other than that, the most prominent mention that Swallow received was for a campaign call he made to 55,000 Utahns during his taxpayer funded trip to D.C. And Swallow did not appear happy about that mention.

“I have a right when I’m not working to do whatever I want to do,” Swallow said. “I have a right to campaign. I have a right to decide if I want to make something an official call or something to promote my candidacy.”  Truly the words of someone intensely focused on fighting Obamacare.

 

“MAILER ALLEGES UTAH AG CANDIDATE WAS INVESTIGATED BY FEDS”

Meanwhile, news surfaced that Swallow had been interviewed by the FBI in connection with a bid scandal helped start in Salt Lake County.  According to the article:

The flier, coming two weeks before Swallow’s June 26 GOP primary against attorney Sean Reyes, raises the issue of a contract dispute involving Salt Lake County and California-based Worldwide Environmental Products, which sought to provide emissions-testing equipment to garages in the county.

Awarding the three-year, $12 million contract turned into a bitter fight. Worldwide alleged the bid was rigged, and the attorney general’s office and, eventually, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office became involved, according to interviews and records obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune.

[…]

The target of the investigation is unclear. The FBI and U.S. attorney’s office would not comment.

Swallow denied that he was under investigation with a veritable tornado of robodials, mailers, and emails. But he was one of only three people interviewed or subpoenaed by the FBI in the matter. No one in Salt Lake County was interviewed in the investigation, which I find a little odd, since it was Salt Lake County’s bid process that was supposedly under investigation.

At the time I noted that “if the FBI had investigated Swallow for corruption, it would be a game changer. Who wants an Attorney General who is corrupt?”

To top it off, then Attorney General Mark Shurtleff went to bat for Swallow, accusing Swallow’s Republican opponent of illegally issuing the mailer. The next day, Shurtleff walked the accusation back when he realized that his accusation were likely defamatory and false.

But it was too late, the robodial had gone out, smearing Swallow’s opponent with outlandish exaggerations that didn’t stand on fact or law.

Meanwhile, I could not find anyone who actually saw the mailer. I was left to wonder if it had actually been issued to more than a few households, as well as who the real source of the mailer had been. It provided an excuse to attack Swallow’s opponent, but wasn’t really seen by many voters.

 

“AG Candidate Talks Of Taking Over Consumer Protection”

Then the City Weekly found evidence that Swallow was promising a quid pro quo for campaign donations.  In light of the allegations coming to light in recent weeks and a federal suit against many of Swallow’s donors filed this week, the City Weekly discovery is even more revealing, even if it didn’t stick to Swallow at the time. It sounded like a promise of quid pro quo.  You support my campaign, and I’ll protect you from enforcement.

[A]ccording to a tape-recorded conversation he had with the owner of a telemarketing sales floor, [John Swallow] has another plan he’s been less vocal about—taking the agency that investigates consumer protection complaints away from the jurisdiction of the Governor’s Office and putting it under the control of the Attorney General’s Office.

“Now, this is kind of confidential, but when I’m the attorney general, I will try to restructure it so Consumer Protection is under the AG [office] and the attorney general has more authority over those investigations. In fact—complete authority over that,” Swallow is heard telling telemarketing-business owner Aaron Christner in an April 7 phone conversation.

Keep in mind that Swallow was making this statement to a member of an industry that has collectively donated $82,284 to his campaign. At least, that’s as much as was apparent then.

 

“Indicted businessman: Utah A.G. tied to alleged scheme”

And then there was this one, just last week.  With the family bible still warm where he placed his hand to be sworn in as attorney general of Utah, Swallow was in headlines again, this time for allegations that he participated in a scheme to help a Utah businessman avoid investigation by the feds by bribing Senator Harry Reid.

Embattled St. George businessman Jeremy Johnson says new Utah Attorney General John Swallow helped broker a deal in 2010 in which Johnson believed he was to pay Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid $600,000 to make a federal investigation into Johnson’s company go away.

But when the federal government filed a lawsuit Johnson thought he had paid to quash, he demanded Swallow return some of the $250,000 initial payment. Then, just days before the Nov. 6 election, Johnson engaged in a frenetic but unsuccessful effort to get Swallow to drop out of the race, saying information about what Johnson called a “bribe” would come out and force the Republican’s resignation if he became attorney general.

The Salt Lake Tribune has an excellent article that provides a timeline of the scandal. As I mentioned earlier, the Daily Herald has called for Swallow’s resignation.

The allegations against Swallow have sufficient legs, even now before every detail has been uncovered, to justify his immediate resignation. His reputation is now seriously tainted, and that is an impossible thing to overcome for an attorney general.

Emails and secret recordings put Swallow in the thick of a possible bribery conspiracy. While Swallow denies doing anything technically illegal (which may or may not be true), it is clear that there is a substantial appearance of wrongdoing. That appearance alone is sufficient to cause any gentleman or statesman, let alone a state’s chief law enforcement officer, to step down for the good of the people.

From long, sad experience, we know that initial reports of this nature virtually always reveal the tip of an iceberg. Public officials caught in shady dealings always deny and deny and deny. And then with each successive public revelation they tend to get squeezed out of office.

Please spare us the pain, Mr. Swallow, and get out now. You can’t be trusted.

I tend to agree, though this is no surprise to people who have read this blog before. I do not trust John Swallow, and he has a history of walking the fine line, if not over that line, between what is ethical and what is not.

Is there more to come out? Almost certainly so. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire, and Swallow’s career—more focused on raising money by promising protection than on actually practicing law—has been shrouded by a lot of smoke. Who knows who else will be hit as the plot thickens around the Attorney General.

Until the smoke clears, though, it’ll be hard to see how bad the fire is and how much damage it has done to Utah and the reputation of the Attorney General’s office.

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They come to Congress poor, and they leave rich.

November 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Have you seen the fascinating 60 minutes piece on how much money Congressmen make on the stock market off insider information?

A bit chilling, to say the least.

[60 Minutes]

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