State elections board chairman Larry Leake is grilling one of N.C. House Speaker Jim Black’s attorneys.
Leake disagrees with Wallace’s characterization of the process North Carolina optometrists used to contribute money to political campaigns.
Leake says the evidence presented last month shows that optometrists had a common fund-raising scheme of sending checks with blank payee lines to the head of the N.C. Optometric Society’s political group.
Leake’s a Democrat. His Republican colleague — Lorraine Shinn — characterized the process this way:
If they had not been up to no good, they would have had the checks filled in to the PAC, they would have dated the checks so they couldn’t avoid the [election] cycle and the amount. And it’s pretty obvious.