Oregon DOJ should initiate a criminal investigation into the Democratic Party of Oregon

Documents first reported here confirm the need for an investigation into whether DPO committed a crime when it misreported the source of a $500,000 donation it used to help elect Kotek governor

It’s time to live up to the name. (Photo by Ron Cooper, Oregon Capital Chronicle).

I promise I will someday soon write about something other than the Democratic Party of Oregon’s misreporting of a $500,000 donation that it used to help elect Tina Kotek governor of Oregon, but today is not that day. We are at a critical moment in that story, driven by recent events and my having gotten my mitts on documents pertinent to a potential criminal investigation into the DPO, which I’ll address here for the first time.

First, I’ll bring you all up to speed on where we stand. Then, I’ll lay out some of the reasons, supported by new information, the Oregon Department of Justice should initiate a criminal investigation into the DPO.

The Oregon Department of Justice front and center.

Things are moving fast in the matter of the Democratic Party of Oregon having misreported the source of a $500,000 campaign donation it used to help elect Tina Kotek governor last year. First, the Oregon Secretary of State slashed the DPO’s fine and dropped her office’s criminal probe in a really lame settlement agreement.

Then, we learned that the Secretary of State’s own legal counsel had effectively dismantled the scant legal basis for the settlement agreement in a memorandum filed for the hearing that was cancelled due to the settlement. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State referred to the Oregon Department of Justice a criminal investigation into the (maybe) source of the donation, Nishad Singh.

The unavoidable putrescence of the settlement agreement spurred the non-Oregon Roundup media into action. Sunday, The Oregonian, in a reasonably forceful editorial, called the settlement agreement “a sweetheart deal for political allies.” Tuesday, The Oregonian’s Hillary Borrud had a story about the lawyer memo that eviscerated the legal basis for the settlement agreement, in which she credited yours truly for finding, requesting and receiving the memo and other documents (which were the basis for my own story on the subject Sunday).

All this attention surely contributed materially to Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum’s Tuesday announcement that she would recuse herself from the DOJ’s donation probe. I suggested she do so back in February when I filed a complaint with her to try to wrest the investigation from the then-and-always conflicted Secretary of State’s office. Rosenblum had contributed over $100,000 to the DPO over the years and thus had her own conflict of interest.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Udland responded to my complaint on February 28:

Well, things have changed. Two successive Secretaries of State made a complete mess of their process, culminating in the settlement agreement that cut by 2/3 the “substantial fine” proposed against the DPO, and punting on the very criminal investigation I had asked DOJ to take up. And, whether or not the statute required Rosenblum to recuse herself, she now has, leaving Deputy AG Udland herself to oversee the investigation.

Had Rosenblum and DOJ acted on my complaint at the time, well, we might be a lot closer to whatever justice looks like in this case. Instead, we’ve moved farther away from it.

One last thing before we are all caught up: the announcement of Rosenblum’s recusal, apparently emailed by a DOJ spokesman to media types who are not me, is an interesting one to parse. Here The Oregonian quoting the spokesman’s statement:

The Secretary of State’s referral only, so far as we know, referenced Nishad Singh. The statement implies that DOJ envisions that its investigation may extend to other individuals or, most interestingly, entities. There is only one entity that is both currently implicated in possible wrongdoing and with which Rosenblum has a conflict of interest: the Democratic Party of Oregon.

Oregon DOJ should include the Democratic Party of Oregon as a subject of the investigation into the donation it misreported.

One silver lining to the justifiably maligned DPO/SOS settlement agreement is we now have access to documents the parties intended to use in the hearing. Some of those documents add significantly to the already strong case for DOJ investigating potential criminal conduct by the DPO. What follows is a brief review of what DOJ should be looking for in any such investigation, and the state of publicly available evidence viewed through that lens.

In Oregon, it is a felony to “knowingly . . . enter or cause the contribution or donation to be entered in accounts or records in another name than that of the person who actually provided the contribution or donation.” (ORS 260.402(2)). In the settlement agreement as well as in public statements, the DPO has admitted that it incorrectly reported the source of the donation as Prime Trust LLC in early October 2022. The only important legal question, then, is whether the DPO knowingly misreported the source. In other words, did the DPO know Prime Trust LLC did not actually provide the $500,000 donation when the DPO reported that it did?

The short answer to that question is, we don’t really know. Absent someone at the DPO admitting that they defrauded the State of Oregon, it would be impossible for us to know right now. For obvious reasons, people at the DPO are reticent to make such an admission, especially when they are not compelled to testify under oath. But that’s the purpose of an investigation: to determine whether there’s substantial evidence suggesting a crime has been committed. The evidence is indeed substantial.

That other time a PAC involved in an Oregon election misreported a donation from Singh as coming from Prime Trust, had to correct it, and the whole thing ended up in the national news.

The strongest evidence that the DPO knew that Prime Trust did not actually provide the donation is the one we’ve known about from the beginning: in spring 2022, a federal PAC participating in a Democratic congressional primary in Oregon misreported Prime Trust as the source of a $1 million donation that was actually from Nishad Singh. On April 19, 2022, Politico, a prominent national news website, reported that the federal PAC had misreported the source of the donation as Prime Trust, when in fact it was Nishad Singh.

The story described the role of Prime Trust as, essentially, a bank transferring funds belonging to Singh, at Singh’s direction:

All of this was knowable six months prior to the DPO’s misreporting of the source of its donation. If the DPO was aware of the federal PAC story, which tracks almost identically with its own misreporting, that strongly suggests the DPO knew Prime Trust was not the source of the donation when it told the State of Oregon it was.

But did the DPO know about the federal PAC story when it reported its donation? According to The Oregonian, the Secretary of State’s office didn’t bother to ask anyone at the DPO that or any other questions before punting on its investigation. The only publicly available witness statement is an affidavit of the DPO’s compliance director Amelia Manlove. Her affidavit notably does not address what, if anything, she knew about the federal PAC story.

There are plenty of reasons to believe people at the DPO knew about the federal PAC story in October 2022. They work in Oregon Democratic politics and probably would have been interested in reading a national story relating to a hotly contested Democrat primary in Oregon.

And then there’s the curious case of Sarah Barnett, DC-based fundraiser extraordinaire for Oregon Democrats. Barnett’s resume includes the following highlights: (1) She was formerly deputy director of the DPO; (2) she was the fundraiser for Carrick Flynn, the congressional primary candidate who benefitted from the Singh donation to that federal PAC ; and (3) she was and perhaps still is the fundraiser for Oregon governor Tina Kotek, who was the primary beneficiary of Singh’s donation to the DPO. (Verification of same can be found by searching Oregon and federal campaign finance databases for Barnett Strategies).

As Flynn’s fundraiser during the time in question, surely Barnett knew about the federal PAC misreporting that involved her client. Did she ever, you know, mention it to her former colleagues at the DPO? Or to Kotek? Or maybe she didn’t because in the relatively small world of Oregon Democratic politics, most everyone knew about the federal PAC story.

Newly public documents show the DPO knew Singh or FTX would be the source of the donation from the beginning (plus a Ron Wyden appearance).

Based on documents I obtained following the DPO/SOS settlement agreement, it’s now clear that the DPO specifically solicited Singh or his then-employer, FTX for a donation. The fact of the solicitation means the DPO knew who the source of the donation was supposed to be from the very beginning. This was not a donation that materialized out of thin air.

This is not the last time you’ll hear or read about the email above. There is, as they say, a lot going on here. Susan McCue is a well-connected Democrat fundraising advisor in DC, including for Singh’s former employer, FTX, and boss, Sam Bankman-Fried.

“Diana” is Diana Rogalle, the DPO’s fundraising contractor working on what ended up being the $500,000 donation. McCue’s pointing out that Rogalle was “all things Ron Wyden” suggests that U.S. Senator Ron Wyden may have been involved in arranging the DPO donation. That would not be a surprise to some of us. I’ll have more on the Wyden connection another time.

“Mark” is Mark Wetjen, a former Obama administration official, was in the fall of 2022 the head of policy and regulatory strategy for FTX. For our purposes here, the September 22 email demonstrates that as of that date, Rogalle, an agent of the DPO, was aware the donation was coming from FTX or someone associated with it.

Wetjen then asks Rogalle for information Singh needed to complete the wire transfer. Rogalle forwarded the request on to Amelia Manlove with the DPO and Jocelyn Tyree and Tim Leahy, both Wyden staffers.

Fast forward to October 7. The DPO wanted to send a mail piece attacking Kotek’s Republican opponent, Christine Drazan. A new Oregon law required the DPO to disclose on the mailer the identity of its top five donors. The donation from Singh was the largest ever received by the DPO.

Rogalle, who knows full well that Singh or FTX were from the beginning the target of the solicitation, reasonably asks if Singh should be reported as the source of the donation. The response from McCue, apparently via Wetjen, was the infamous “Nishad prefers Prime Trust (but not strongly)[.]”

Relying upon Singh’s weakly held preference, the DPO went on to identify Prime Trust as the donor on the mailer and in its October 9 filing with the Oregon Secretary of State. This despite the knowledge of employees and agents of the DPO that Singh or his employer FTX were the intended source of the donation from the beginning of the solicitation. Singh’s agents did not ever say Prime Trust was the source of the donation, only that he preferred (“not strongly”) that the DPO describe Prime Trust as the source.

An actual investigation would involve asking Rogalle who she thought was the source of the donation. An actual investigation would involve asking Manlove, Rogalle and others with the DPO what they knew about that federal PAC story from earlier in the year.

Oregonians have thus far been deprived of an actual investigation into the DPO’s misreporting of a donation that helped determine the outcome of the 2022 governor’s race. There are ample reasons to believe the DPO knew Prime Trust was not the source of the donation when they told Oregonians it was.

The Oregon Department of Justice must provide Oregonians the actual investigation into the Democratic Party of Oregon they deserve and the law requires. It ideally would do so by appointing a third-party prosecutor, like the Marion County District Attorney, whose employment does not rely upon the political allies of the DPO.