‘Incomplete, inconsistent, often inaccurate’: Report finds Del. Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s campaign reports broke the law

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Delaware Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s political campaigns repeatedly violated Delaware law by not disclosing $298,000 in payments to her husband, and by failing to record advances the couple made to her campaigns as loans, a report from the state Department of Elections concluded.

Hall-Long’s campaign reports for 2016 through 2023, even after being amended in December, still have not disclosed $91,000 in payments to Dana Long, who had been his wife’s campaign treasurer and wrote the checks to himself, the report said.

The investigation, conducted by a former Philadelphia FBI chief Jeffrey Lampinski, found several instances of wrongdoing, sloppiness and incompleteness in how the Committee to Elect Bethany Hall-Long accounted for expenses.

“I find the Committee’s account of expenditures in its public campaign finance reporting incomplete, inconsistent, and often inaccurate, leading to an unreliable picture of its financial affairs,’’ Lampinski wrote in the damning 16-page report.

“Further, I find that several reported expenditures [especially in 2016] are questionably personal, and not campaign related. Finally, in those five instances in which the Committee misrepresented the true payee of an expenditure, I find its public campaign finance reporting misleading.’’

Hall-Long, who is in a three-way Democratic primary race to succeed Gov. John Carney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. She has previously apologized for sloppy campaign reporting and mistakes that had led to a revolt among top campaign staff and volunteers in September, when she announced her candidacy for state government’s highest political office.

The report was made public late Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that WHYY News made last week after sources said it had been finalized. State Elections Commissioner Anthony Albence had provided the report to Hall-Long last week, writing then that he did “not intend to publicly post or release” it unless a public records request was made.

Failing to properly disclose campaign loans and spending is a misdemeanor crime under Delaware law, punishable by up to one year in prison. But despite Lampinski’s findings that the Hall-Long reports violated Delaware law dozens of times, Albence informed the lieutenant governor in writing that he would not pursue criminal charges.

“I do not not intend to refer this matter to the Attorney General” for further investigation and prosecution as permitted in state law, Albence wrote. Nor did Albence issue any fines to Hall-Long.

Instead, Albence ordered Hall-Long to “take prompt corrective action by filing the necessary amended campaign finance reports to ensure all committee transactions … are accurately and fully reported. The law requires such disclosure, and the public is entitled to have access to complete, accurate, and timely reporting and the full transparency such reporting provides.”

Albence is an appointee of Carney, and the incumbent governor has endorsed Hall-Long’s candidacy in her race against New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer and former state environmental protection chief Collin O’Mara.

Attorney General Kathy Jennings, who according to sources has been prodding Albence behind the scenes to disclose the report publicly, issued a statement Tuesday that said she supported his conclusion that the law’s “definition of a crime is too narrow to prosecute.”

Jennings wrote that if charges were brought, a defense attorney “could credibly attribute the committee’s errors to carelessness. We cannot pursue charges where the law does not provide the standards to do so; but neither should we abide a precedent that flouts the spirit of the law when committees demonstrate negligence.”

Jennings wrote that the report “reveals critical failures in a campaign committee’s financial structures and official explanations from that campaign that do not survive scrutiny. That Delaware’s campaign finance laws are unclear enough to permit those inadequacies — not just of this campaign, but theoretically of any — tells me that they beg for reform.”

Jennings pledged that her office “will be working to recommend reforms to the General Assembly that would seal these gaps and enable the kind of accountability that warrants the public’s trust in our campaign finance rules.”

Meyer and O’Mara did not immediately comment on the report about their foe. The primary election is Sept. 10  — less than seven weeks from now.

Undisclosed payments to husband triggered probe

The report’s release comes 10 months after Hall-Long suspended fundraising for her nascent campaign after her campaign manager and fund-raiser resigned and several volunteers bolted.

Several sources told WHYY News in October that she had initially refused to provide access to the campaign’s bank accounts so her top staff could verify the accuracy of finances before leading her effort for higher office.

And when Hall-Long did turn the documents over, campaign aides said they were stunned to find that more than $207,000 in checks had been written to Dana Long — the treasurer who wrote campaign checks — but that the payments to her husband had not been documented in dozens of reports filed with the Department of Elections from 2016 through 2022. Hall-Long told the staffers the money was to repay loans to the campaign, but no paperwork showing that loans had been made were produced.

Hall-Long announced in October that she was conducting an audit of her campaign finances, and in November filed seven years of amended reports. She later wrote that a private accounting firm, Summit CPA Group LLC, had found no wrongdoing in her campaign report, only errors in reporting receipts and expenses.

She claimed to have loaned the campaign $308,000 during that seven-year period and showed repayments to herself — not her husband — totaling $207,000. Her campaign spokeswoman said she would not seek to recover the balance of the outstanding debt.

Lampinski, who cited the WHYY News account of the turmoil within her campaign in his report, noted that Hall-Long’s explanations and amended reports did not quell questions from the media.

He wrote that the lingering suspicions led Albence to hire his firm, Forensic Litigation Consultants LLC of Media, Pa., to scrutinize the reports and bank records and see if they matched up.

Lampinski did not interview Hall-Long and his report did not indicate why he did not. He wrote that he tried to speak with Karen Remick of Summit but she would not cooperate. Dana Long agreed to be interviewed with his attorney present, and Lampinski also had access to the state’s reports and the campaign’s bank records.

The report focused extensively on the payments to Dana Long, which Hall-Long has never publicly disclosed, either in written statements or the reports she filed with the state.

Among Lampinski’s findings:

• The campaigns, through 113 checks written by Dana Long, paid the couple roughly $299,000, all but $1,100 to Dana Long, but Lampinski could only substantiate $266,000 in loans. “In other words, they disbursed themselves $33,178.65 more than I was able to substantiate in personal loans to the campaign,” Lampinski wrote.
• A total of $173,000 found to be loans or advances by the Hall-Long campaign was charged on 16 of the couple’s credit cards, almost all of which offered reward points for goodies such as free hotel stays, flight discounts or “cash-back” refunds to the card balance. Dana Long acknowledged he and his wife “made use of the points awards, but he disputed the notion that earning points was a primary driver behind the couple’s credit card use,” the report said.
• Documentation for five checks, including four that were written to Dana Long for a total of $45,000, showed that the money was paid to another entity. For example, a $20,000 check to Long in 2016 was listed as a payment to Buying Time LLC, a Washington, D.C. political strategy firm. Long’s credit card statement, however, showed a “corresponding charge” of $20,000.

Lampinski wrote that Dana Long “had no answer’’ as to why a check he wrote to himself was recorded in the campaign report as one to Buying Time.

Lampinski wrote that he “laid a copy of the expenditure check before” Long but “he said nothing,” then asked to confer with his attorney. After doing so, Long’s lawyer said his client would not “entertain or answer any further questions on his reporting of this expenditure” or other “four instances of falsified payees.”

The report also noted that for 2016, during Hall-Long’s first race for statewide office — the lieutenant governor’s post — Lampinski could only substantiate as campaign expenses “13 of over 250 small-dollar expenditures shown as credit card charges at small retailers, such as gas stations, convenience stores, pizzerias, home improvement stores, groceries, restaurants, sub shops, pharmacies, etc. Well over 200 of the expenditures I couldn’t find or trace to any source document.”

In subsequent years, such “small-dollar type expenditures” weren’t listed in the campaign reports, even though the couple’s credit card records show “a substantial number” of such spending, the report said.

Ex-FBI chief finds fault with ‘audit’ Hall-Long had done

Lampinski’s report included what it called a redacted version of the two-page document  Summitt CPA provided to Hall-Long.

Hall-Long had resisted calls by Meyer, O’Mara and some open government groups to release what she had deemed Summit CPA’s “audit,’’ and officials from Summit had not responded to requests by WHYY News for the report or comment.

The Summit CPA report, produced in one month, was based on information Hall-Long had provided for the period from January 2016 through Dec. 31, 2022. (Reports for 2023 were not filed until January 2024, in keeping with Delaware law.)

“All disbursements from the account have been associated with campaign-related expenses and loans and no money is due to the campaign by any related outside party,’’ Summit CPA wrote. “The account is reconciled.”

Lampinski’s review, which took more than six months, had a far less sanguine conclusion and took issue with the findings and methodology used by Summit CPA.

“In a key distinction between my reconciliation and Summit’s, I sought to substantiate both that an expenditure occurred and that it was campaign related,” he wrote.

“I consistently sought competent audit evidence to confirm both. If I found an expenditure was substantiated by a source document, yet there was no evidence beyond the candidate’s representation to support a conclusion it was campaign related, I found it indeterminate.”

“That the Summit CPA Group did not appear to seek audit evidence beyond the Long’s representation that certain credit card charges were campaign related, and further accepted purported 2016 charges as campaign related with no documentation the charges had occurred, likely accounts in large part for the difference in our respective findings.”