Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2012Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/Washington Post/Getty Images
If you?re looking for indoor fun in 100-degree weather, go ahead and Google Virginia?s ethics laws for elected officials. First thing you?ll notice? The word ?lax? is used to modify the words ?Virginia Ethics Laws? so often in news accounts that you could not be faulted for believing ?Lax Virginia Ethics Laws? to be the official title of the statute.
The next thing you?ll notice? That seems to just be the way things are, here in the Old Dominion.
Embattled Gov. Bob McDonnell has probably just cratered a once-promising political career over $145,000 in undisclosed gifts?each worthy of its own episode of Real Housewives of Richmond?including a $6,500 Rolex, a New York shopping spree for his wife, limo rides, catering for his daughter?s wedding, and a ride in a Ferrari. Is it shocking that McDonnell and his wife?twisted themselves into pretzels to shill for the donor company?s weird tobacco-based nutritional supplements?
Under the ?Lax Virginia Ethics Law,? there is no cap on the amount of gifts an elected official can receive, so long as all gifts valued at more than $50 are disclosed annually. Moreover, any gifts to spouses and immediate family members are not counted as gifts to the official. So that when, for instance, Jonnie R. Williams Sr., the chief executive of the foundering nutritional supplements company Star Scientific, paid out $15,000 to cater the governor?s daughter?s wedding in 2011, that was considered a gift to the daughter?even though the governor signed the catering contract and the caterers refunded the overpayment to his wife.
McDonnell is now subject to tanking poll numbers, an FBI investigation, and a grand jury probe over the possibility that he did favors for Star Scientific in exchange for gifts and cash. Indeed nobody can have been happier than McDonnell when the commonwealth?s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, pushed him out of the headlines midweek with ethics questions about his own relationship with Star Scientific and an unerringly Victorian zeal for criminalizing every act of consensual oral sex within state lines.
Cuccinelli was cleared Thursday following a three-month ethics probe by an independent investigator who found no ethics violations in his failure to disclose $5,100 in gifts from the CEO of Star Scientific. The attorney general had no conflict of interest when he purchased shares of Star Scientific and vacationed at the CEO?s various properties, all while his office defended a tax-assessment lawsuit filed by Star Scientific, the same Star Scientific in which he held more than $10,000 in stock. This, while occasionally failing to disclose gifts from Williams in his annual disclosure forms. Because a guy forgets.
As the independent inquiry determined, ?Although one cannot help but question whether repeated omissions of Williams are coincidence or a pattern reflecting intent to conceal, the disclosure of several other benefits and gifts from Williams in his original statements suggests that the attorney general was not attempting to conceal the relationship.? My friend Scott Pilutik memorably characterizes this legal conclusion as follows: ?Because Cuccinelli didn't always conceal the fact that he was creating an appearance of impropriety by accepting gifts, well, nothing to see here. If only everyone earned so much mileage out of all the times they choose not to break the law.?
(Actually, the best zinger in Thursday?s ethics report is not even the bit about how Cuccinelli did disclose some lavish gifts. It?s where the investigator explains that the attorney general took $6,000 in free food supplements from Star Scientific since, ?because of his engineering background, [Cuccinelli] became interested in the purported science surrounding the company?s Anatabloc product.? It?s heartening to hear that the same attorney general who doesn?t believe in the science behind climate change can be such a staunch believer in the science behind unregulated food supplements.
So there it is. No ethics violations by Cuccinelli. And that?s because of Virginia?s lax ethics laws. Actually, not just lax. Ephemeral. Actually, no. Virginia was ranked 47 out of 50 and awarded an F in a comprehensive study on corruption risk in a recent national State Integrity Investigation. So it?s not so much ethics laws as ethics suggestions.
Jessica Tillipman has been blogging hard about the Virginia disclosure rules for the FCPA blog, and she points out that the commonwealth?s F is well-earned:
?Per the State Integrity Investigation, [Virginia] is one of only nine states without a statewide ethics commission and one of four states without campaign finance limits. Moreover, according to the National Conference of State Legislators, Virginia is one of just ten states in the country that, as noted above, does not limit the value of personal gifts provided to elected officials.? ?
Tillipman told me that the fact that there is no cap on the amounts one can give as a gift in Virginia is ?almost unheard of.? She added that the gifts given to McDonnell, including the Rolex, the NFL tickets, and the lavish vacation loaners, would have been clearly impermissible under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. ?Why is it,? she wonders, ?that we permit people to accept gifts in Virginia that they couldn?t accept if they worked in India??
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