It certainly wasn't the most shocking revelation in last week's Seattle Times report about Mayor Ed Murray's alleged sexual abuse of children, but you may have noticed this tidbit:
Murray hired a Portland attorney, Katherine Heekin, who distributed Simpson’s and Anderson’s criminal records and attacked their credibility, saying their story was false.
Murray paid Heekin more than $10,700 from his surplus campaign funds in 2008, according to Public Disclosure Commission records. Another $8,000 went to a private investigator.
Jeff Simpson and Lloyd Anderson are the two men who are not involved in the civil lawsuit against the mayor but who give similar accounts of being abused by Murray when they were teenagers and he was in his 20s and 30s. (Murray has denied the allegations.) The two men tried to get their stories out nearly a decade ago but Murray's team worked to discredit them and did so using campaign money, according to the Times and campaign records. At the time, Murray was a state senator. Campaign expense reports from the time label the payments "research" or "legal research."
You're not the only one wondering: Is that legal?
The Washington State Public Disclosure Commission is investigating received a complaint Saturday about this use of campaign funds. The complaint, filed online by Christopher Clifford, argues the money Murray spent on the lawyer and private investigator "had nothing to do with any campaign" and therefore violated campaign finance rules. UPDATE: PDC director Evelyn Fielding Lopez, who previously told The Stranger the commission would investigate this complaint, now says she didn't realize the significance of the fact that the use of campaign funds happened back in 2008. In fact, the PDC has a five-year statute of limitations, so the agency won't be taking any further action to find out if Murray's use of campaign funds was illegal.
The law is muddled on what exactly candidates can pay for using extra campaign money. State law outlines limits on leftover campaign fund expenditures, but those limits include a catch-all category that allows candidates to use the money for a "nonreimbursed public office related expense." That broad category is defined as any expense "incurred by an elected or appointed official, or a member of his or her immediate family, solely because of being an official."
Is needing to hire a lawyer to help discredit someone accusing you of sexual abuse really an expense incurred "solely because of being an official?" That's not clear, says the PDC's executive director Evelyn Fielding Lopez.
"Legal fees might be an expense that an elected official has because she is an official, but I'm not sure these legal fees were incurred because of the mayor's position as an official," Fielding Lopez said in an email. The PDC will now ask the mayor to respond to the complaint.
A consultant who works on the mayor's current re-election campaign directed questions to the mayor's personal spokesperson, Jeff Reading. Reading was not immediately available to comment but said he would respond later today.
