RALEIGH -- A computer spreadsheet released to state investigators last week shows that Gov. Bev Perdue's staff kept detailed records on private aircraft flights provided by her supporters, according to a report sent Saturday to members of the State Board of Elections.
After Perdue's 2008 gubernatorial campaign failed to report 41 such flights until last year, her staff blamed the lapse on poor record-keeping.
But the new investigative report appears to undercut that explanation, showing that Perdue's staff had a detailed process in place for tracking her travel as far back as 2005. Perdue, a Democrat then serving as lieutenant governor, was gearing up to run for the state's top elected job.
The report by Kim Westbrook Strach, the elections board's lead investigator, details a spring 2007 meeting between Will Polk, then chief legal advisor in the lieutenant governor's office, and Perdue's campaign manager, Zach Ambrose. They talked at length about how to report campaign flights properly.
According to Polk, who was interviewed as part of the investigation, Ambrose had a 2004 advisory opinion from the Board of Elections that instructed candidates on how to calculate the value of flights on private aircraft and to report the travel as in-kind donations. Polk said Ambrose had also created a template for a spreadsheet to track each flight.
As the campaign progressed, flights were logged into that master spreadsheet. Polk was then tasked with performing an audit of earlier flights.
Polk said that in spring 2008, the campaign staff had records documenting and accounting for all flights until then, according to Strach's report.
Still, Perdue's campaign failed to publicly disclose many of those flights until 2009, after reports surfaced about $60,000 in unreported flights provided to former Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat. His campaign was fined $100,000 by the state elections board last year.
Spreadsheet surfaces
Though Perdue's campaign organization has been under investigation over the unreported flights for more than eight months, it did not turn over a copy of the master spreadsheet for tracking those flights until Thursday, after Strach learned of its existence through interviews with Polk, Ambrose and others.
"I have concerns about the information in particular that Will Polk has provided to us," said Larry Leake, a Democrat who chairs the state elections board. "He seems to take the position that he provided to the campaign a complete and exhaustive listing of all the private flights utilized by the governor."
The board is expected to discuss the results of the investigation at a meeting in Asheville scheduled for Tuesday. Leake said among the options the board may consider is holding public hearings where individuals with knowledge of Perdue's flights and her campaign's efforts to track them would be subpoenaed to testify under oath, as happened in the Easley case.
Strach declined to comment Saturday about her report, saying she would leave it to the board to discuss the new evidence.
Perdue campaign spokesman Marc Farinella said once again Saturday that there was no intent to hide the flights by not disclosing them in campaign finance reports.
"The campaign did a lousy job of tracking flights," Farinella said. "It's not that the data didn't exist. It wasn't in the right places, in the hands of the right people. Too much stuff fell through the cracks."
Asked why the spreadsheet documenting the flights was not turned over until last week, he said that investigators had not requested it.
"We've been completely forthcoming," Farinella said. "The notion there was some effort to intentionally not report flights is baloney."
Joe Sinsheimer, a Democratic Party consultant turned watchdog, said he is troubled by the failure to provide investigators with the spreadsheet earlier.
"It's disturbing when you see the office of the governor play 'hide the ball under the cup' with state investigators," Sinsheimer said. "The report seems to indicate a deliberate and intentional effort to avoid reporting, as opposed to the Perdue campaign's protestations over the last year that this is all a matter of sloppy bookkeeping."
The report also raises questions, Sinsheimer said, of whether state employees were tasked with either procuring or tracking Perdue's campaign flights. If that work was done on government time and on state equipment, he said, that is illegal.
The report sent to the board Saturday is intended to amend an earlier investigative report Strach submitted in June. The earlier report was heavily edited by Strach's superiors at the Board of Elections to remove references to Perdue staffers she had not been given the opportunity to interview, including Ambrose.
In a June 25 letter released with the earlier report, elections director Gary Bartlett said "no evidence surfaced indicating any intent of wrongdoing."
Perdue's campaign did not properly disclose a total of more than $56,000 in air travel during the 2004 and 2008 elections, according to the board's investigation.
Though Perdue's campaign amended its campaign reports during the last year to include 41 previously undisclosed flights paid for by donors, Strach uncovered a 42nd flight.
In April, as Strach pressed the Perdue campaign to hand over documents related to its undisclosed flights, an attorney for the campaign sent a letter asking that Strach step aside because her husband worked as the attorney for the state Republican Party.
Strach, who is registered as an unaffiliated voter, said that she did not see her husband's job as a conflict. Her husband has since resigned as general counsel for the state party, which was an unpaid position.
On Saturday, Farinella again characterized Strach as a biased investigator with an ax to grind.
Previous cases
Strach was not accused of a partisan conflict during her previous investigations of other Democratic figures. Her past probes helped lead to criminal convictions for former Agriculture Secretary Meg Scott Phipps, former House Speaker Jim Black and former Rep. Thomas Wright.
Sinsheimer said criticism of Strach was little more than an attempt to undermine her credibility without having to show any factual errors in her investigation.
"Anybody who watched Kim Strach in the Jim Black or Thomas Wright investigations knows she is a meticulous researcher and a strong defender of the state's campaign finance laws," Sinsheimer said. "In my mind, those sorts of attacks against her credibility are beneath the office of the governor."
Strach's work in the Perdue campaign investigation has led to open divisions at the State Board of Elections and with Bartlett, her boss.
In addition to discussing the flights report Tuesday, Leake said, the board would go into a closed session to discuss "personnel and legal matters." He would not say whether Strach was the employee to be discussed in the closed-door meeting.
