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This story was supported by a statehouse coverage grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Delaware Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s political campaigns repeatedly violated Delaware law by not disclosing $298,000 in payments to her husband, and by failing to record advances the couple made to her campaigns as loans, a report from the state Department of Elections concluded.
Hall-Long’s campaign reports for 2016 through 2023, even after being amended in December, still have not disclosed $91,000 in payments to Dana Long, who had been his wife’s campaign treasurer and wrote the checks to himself, the report said.
The investigation, conducted by a former Philadelphia FBI chief Jeffrey Lampinski, found several instances of wrongdoing, sloppiness and incompleteness in how the Committee to Elect Bethany Hall-Long accounted for expenses.
“I find the Committee’s account of expenditures in its public campaign finance reporting incomplete, inconsistent, and often inaccurate, leading to an unreliable picture of its financial affairs,’’ Lampinski wrote in the damning 16-page report.
“Further, I find that several reported expenditures [especially in 2016] are questionably personal, and not campaign related. Finally, in those five instances in which the Committee misrepresented the true payee of an expenditure, I find its public campaign finance reporting misleading.’’
Hall-Long, who is in a three-way Democratic primary race to succeed Gov. John Carney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. She has previously apologized for sloppy campaign reporting and mistakes that had led to a revolt among top campaign staff and volunteers in September, when she announced her candidacy for state government’s highest political office.
The report was made public late Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that WHYY News made last week after sources said it had been finalized. State Elections Commissioner Anthony Albence had provided the report to Hall-Long last week, writing then that he did “not intend to publicly post or release” it unless a public records request was made.
Failing to properly disclose campaign loans and spending is a misdemeanor crime under Delaware law, punishable by up to one year in prison. But despite Lampinski’s findings that the Hall-Long reports violated Delaware law dozens of times, Albence informed the lieutenant governor in writing that he would not pursue criminal charges.
“I do not not intend to refer this matter to the Attorney General” for further investigation and prosecution as permitted in state law, Albence wrote. Nor did Albence issue any fines to Hall-Long.
Instead, Albence ordered Hall-Long to “take prompt corrective action by filing the necessary amended campaign finance reports to ensure all committee transactions … are accurately and fully reported. The law requires such disclosure, and the public is entitled to have access to complete, accurate, and timely reporting and the full transparency such reporting provides.”
Albence is an appointee of Carney, and the incumbent governor has endorsed Hall-Long’s candidacy in her race against New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer and former state environmental protection chief Collin O’Mara.
Attorney General Kathy Jennings, who according to sources has been prodding Albence behind the scenes to disclose the report publicly, issued a statement Tuesday that said she supported his conclusion that the law’s “definition of a crime is too narrow to prosecute.”
Jennings wrote that if charges were brought, a defense attorney “could credibly attribute the committee’s errors to carelessness. We cannot pursue charges where the law does not provide the standards to do so; but neither should we abide a precedent that flouts the spirit of the law when committees demonstrate negligence.”
Jennings wrote that the report “reveals critical failures in a campaign committee’s financial structures and official explanations from that campaign that do not survive scrutiny. That Delaware’s campaign finance laws are unclear enough to permit those inadequacies — not just of this campaign, but theoretically of any — tells me that they beg for reform.”
Jennings pledged that her office “will be working to recommend reforms to the General Assembly that would seal these gaps and enable the kind of accountability that warrants the public’s trust in our campaign finance rules.”
Meyer and O’Mara did not immediately comment on the report about their foe. The primary election is Sept. 10 — less than seven weeks from now.
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