The Independent isn’t exactly my favorite rag around, but it has an entertaining summary of the Easley board of election hearings last week.
At a couple points, Bob Geary highlights Don Carrington’s work on the Easley scandals:
Don Carrington, of the John Locke Foundation, starting sniffing around Cannonsgate in 2005, when a tipster alerted him that Easley bought a prime lot there, maybe for less than the going rate.
Years earlier, Carrington caught Attorney General Easley using his campaign media team, including Schorr, to make a series of consumer-oriented TV ads with public funds. The ads helped Easley win the governorship, and they also convinced Carrington that Easley “perhaps wasn’t always truthful.”
This time, Carrington questioned Easley’s judgment for buying a lot in a project that the state had only days before approved for a waste disposal permit. And he said the selling price of $549,880 was less than others with similar lots had paid. It was only this year that The News & Observer obtained a closing document showing that Easley didn’t even pay that much. With a secret discount of 25 percent from the developer, Easley saved $137,470?but concealed it from public records.
Update: 81 percent of Triangle Business Journal readers think Easley misused campaign funds.
