Three More Perdue Donors Convicted In Campaign Probe | Eastern North Carolina Now

   Publisher's Note: The author of this report, Rick Henderson, is the managing editor for Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

Total of five Perdue associates have taken plea deals in schemes to hide money

    RALEIGH     Three associates of former Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue -- New Bern attorney Trawick "Buzzy" Stubbs, Morganton businessman Charles Michael Fulenwider, and former Western Piedmont Community College board member Robert Lee Caldwell -- were convicted Wednesday of misdemeanor charges for obstruction of justice in an investigation of fundraising violations during Perdue's 2008 campaign for governor.

    With the 2011 felony plea of Perdue's former campaign finance director Peter Reichard and the 2012 misdemeanor plea taken by attorney Juleigh Sitton, who ran Perdue's Western North Carolina office, five people connected to the Perdue campaign have been convicted of fundraising crimes.

    Stubbs and Fulenwider each were fined $5,000 and Caldwell was fined $500. The three men were banned from participating in any political fundraising activities for 18 months.

    "Rational people do irrational things," said Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens during Wednesday's hearing. "They seem to take leave of their senses during political campaigns."

    Prosecutors have stated that Perdue never has been implicated in the criminal activities. Perdue, who served two terms as lieutenant governor before winning the governor's race in 2008, chose last year not to seek a second term.

    Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby, who led the prosecution, said Wednesday's plea agreements put an end to his investigation of Perdue's 2008 campaign finances.

    Perdue's donors attracted the attention of the State Board of Elections soon after it wrapped up its 2009 criminal investigation of Perdue's Democratic predecessor Mike Easley. The board fined Easley's campaign committee $100,000 for filing false campaign finance reports related to flights he received from former N.C. State University Board of Trustees chairman McQueen Campbell and others. Easley's committee paid a small portion of the fine. The former governor later pleaded guilty to a Class I felony for filing a false campaign report. Easley lost his law license for two years and it was reinstated recently.

The defendants

    Stubbs, who for roughly 25 years was the law partner of Perdue's late first husband Gary, admitted that in 2007 and 2008 he provided flights worth more than $28,000 to the Perdue campaign after he had given the maximum donations permitted. He was charged with felony obstruction of justice and forcing the Perdue committee to file false reports. He is a seasoned political donor who has made at least 250 contributions to state or local candidates or committees over the past two decades. The January issue of Business North Carolina noted that Stubbs' colleagues in the legal profession had named him the state's top bankruptcy attorney.

    Caldwell, a former state magistrate, was charged with concealing the payment for a December 2007 flight Fulenwider arranged that took Perdue to a fundraiser in Manteo for then-state Senate leader Marc Basnight. The flight originated in Hickory, picked up Perdue and her party in Chapel Hill, flew to Manteo, and dropped Perdue in Chapel Hill before returning to Hickory.

    The flight was invoiced originally to Fulenwider, who also had donated the maximum to the campaign. In 2010, Fulenwider told Carolina Journal he needed to find someone else to pay for the flight. He recruited Caldwell, who convinced a local barber, James Fleming, to write a check covering roughly $3,000 of the $4,000 flight. State records indicate that Fleming had not made a campaign donation in at least 20 years.

    Caldwell reimbursed Fleming, which violated state laws banning political donations made in the name of another person. In February 2011, Caldwell was indicted for the payment scheme. In court Wednesday, Fulenwider was named as the person who paid Caldwell for the flight, though Fulenwider was not indicted in that scheme.

    Fulenwider's guilty plea related to a separate plan in which he paid a portion of Sitton's salary when she worked for Perdue. Fulenwider gave $32,000 to a company owned by Reichard, which then paid Sitton $2,000 a month. This scheme also provided the basis for the charges that led to the plea agreements Reichard and Sitton accepted.

The investigation

    Around the time the elections board convened its hearing on Easley's campaign flights, state Republican Party officials noticed that the Perdue committee had begun amending its reports from the 2008 campaign, reimbursing donors who had provided flights as much as two years earlier. State campaign laws require any services provided to a political campaign to be reimbursed in a timely manner -- typically within a few days.

    The elections board later opened an investigation of the Perdue flights and after finding the committee neglected to pay for more than 40 flights in a timely manner, Aug. 24, 2010 the board fined her campaign committee $30,000. The elections board ended its investigation without taking sworn testimony.

    During the board's investigation, then-state Republican Party Chairman Tom Fetzer asked Willoughby to review the board's work, accusing Chairman Larry Leake, Executive Director Gary Bartlett, and John Wallace, who served as an attorney for the state Democratic Party and the campaigns of Easley and Perdue, of interfering with the probe in an effort to minimize Perdue's potential role.

    Carolina Journal examined the flight logs and other documents produced during the elections board investigation and a few days after the board fined Perdue, CJ reported the records implicated Stubbs and Reichard in attempts to hide payment for campaign flights.

    In October 2010, the State Bureau of Investigation, at Willoughby's request, began its own investigation of the campaign. At the time, Willoughby said the board's investigation of Perdue appeared to be less "careful and deliberate" than earlier ones.

    A subsequent story by CJ detailed the convoluted payment arrangement for the flight involving Fleming, Caldwell, Fulenwider, and Perdue.

    Perdue currently is a spring fellow in politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She is scheduled to become a distinguished visiting fellow at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University this fall.

    To read CJ's full coverage of the Perdue flying operations, visit here.