The Arizona Attorney General’s Office is now investigating three political candidates who face allegations their campaigns falsified records to obtain millions of dollars in public funding.
Green Party candidates Risa Lombardo and Duwayne Collier and Republican Scott Neely all qualified for funding from the Arizona Citizen Clean Elections Commission, which provides public dollars to candidates who forgo large PAC and corporate dollars.
Lombardo, a candidate for governor, received $2.8 million in primary and general election funding while Collier, who is running for secretary of state, received around $740,000. Neely, who lost in the GOP gubernatorial primary, received $1.1 million.
But, last week, the commission voted to investigate whether they actually qualified for that funding. That came after Clean Elections Executive Director Thomas Collins told the commissioners he found evidence the candidates did not actually qualify for the money in the first place.
At issue are each campaigns’ $5 qualifying contributions, donations the candidates must collect early on in the campaign season to qualify for Clean Elections funding.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office opened a criminal investigation into the three candidates over the same issue, spokesman Richie Taylor confirmed.
Taylor declined to comment further on the investigation.
According to the Clean Elections Commission, gubernatorial candidates Lombardo and Neely were required to gather at least 4,000 qualifying contributions. Collier, who is running for secretary of state, had to gather 2,500.
After a review by county recorders, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that each candidate turned in enough contributions, which resulted in the commission releasing funding to each campaign.
But, at a Clean Elections meeting last week, Collins said a preliminary review revealed the three candidates did not actually gather enough qualifying contributions to receive funding.
That includes unusual donation patterns, including that many of the contributions came from the same people, many of whom had no history giving to political campaigns in Arizona. He also cited an Arizona Mirror report in which six of those alleged donors said they never made the contributions in question.
Collins also said each candidate deposited the $5 contributions in single, lump-sum transactions shortly before applying for Clean Elections funding, a pattern he said did not line up with typical candidate behavior.
“So this is more than an unusual banking practice,” Collins said. “It's a positive break in the financial evidence connecting the purported contributors to the money deposited by the campaigns.
All three candidates denied wrongdoing when the allegations were brought before the commission.
“I haven't engaged in any fraud, and I'm confident I will be exonerated soon,” Neely said.
Timothy La Sota, an attorney representing Collier and Lombardo, said there was nothing odd about the contributions collected by the candidates or the fact that they chose to deposit them all at once.
“The bottom line here is black helicopter material. I mean, this is a really far-fetched conspiracy theory that doesn't really make a lot of sense at any level,” La Sota said.
