I applaud Virginia Democrats for trying to make an issue of the political team of the MAGA lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, not knowing whether they needed to file a disclosure on what appears to be a free private plane trip gifted her by a donor, and I want to help them, but there’s an obvious problem.
The problem: Donald Trump.
Trump has, over the past nine years, made political grift into an art form, to the point that, it’s hard to get people to care about more in the way of MAGA grift, with the president hawking, among other things, worthless crypto, Trump Bibles and assorted Chinese-made campaign merch and even Teslas from the grounds of the White House.
So, OK, the lieutenant governor, who is running for governor, might have gotten a free plane ride from a car dealer from Winchester to Abingdon that would have cost her maybe $4,000 to $5,000, at the most.
Trump is grifting, literally, billions.
What else ya got, basically?
“Either Sears lied on her financial disclosures when she filed them, and violated Virginia law, or she’s lying to Virginians now. Today I’m calling on Sears to release the records immediately and come clean about the disclosure, what happened, and why her team is ‘still trying to figure it out,’” said Del. Marcus Simon, a Democratic lawmaker who is the chair of the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch broke the story on the private plane trip to a Republican Party event in Abingdon in 2023, which per state law would have to be disclosed if it was provided free of charge to Earle-Sears, as appears to be the case.
The T-D report indicated that the travel between Earle-Sears’ home in Winchester and Abingdon appears to track with flights made that day – April 29, 2023 – on a private plane owned by Gary Duncan, a Southwest Virginia car dealer.
Duncan, according to the Virginia Public Access Project campaign finance database, made a $10,000 contribution to the Earle-Sears campaign on June 16.
The line from Simon about her team “still trying to figure it out,” with respect to the apparent lack of disclosure of what would be considered a gift under the terms of the State and Local Government Conflict of Interests Act if Earle-Sears didn’t pay for the plane flight, is telling.
Not reporting a gift as required under the Act is only a crime if it is a “knowing violation – a “knowing violation” being defined as “one in which the person engages in conduct, performs an act or refuses to perform an act when he knows that the conduct is prohibited or required by this chapter.”
Oversight isn’t a “knowing violation,” and it would tough, one could presume, to bring a criminal charge – for what the state code defines as a misdemeanor – without some smoking-gun evidence that the lack of reporting was intentional.
In effect, no, no Commonwealth’s attorney anywhere in Virginia is going to take this on.
You could, of course, pull a Chris Graham, and file a criminal complaint, convince a magistrate to issue an arrest warrant and try the case yourself, as I’m doing with the case of a man who is facing a criminal reckless driving charge after squealing tires and blowing smoke within a few feet of a crowd of political protestors in April.
ICYMI
- Staunton: Magistrate issues warrant in ‘rolling coal’ incident at April 5 protest
- Staunton: Somehow, I’m now the prosecutor in the April 5 reckless driving case
- Update: Judge issues continuance in Staunton protest reckless driving case
- Staunton PD officer warned Armentrout about ‘spinning tires’ before letting him walk
Good luck with all of that.
Now, that lack of reporting from the Earle-Sears team, if that’s what happened here, would, perhaps, seem to indicate a certain level of sloppiness, after Josh Stanfield reported on Virginia Politics Revealed earlier this year that the LG had traveled to Israel on a trip paid for by an outside group, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, but had not disclosed the gifted travel as required by law.
Earle-Sears later filed a revised ethics disclosure acknowledging that $6,000 trip, among a total of $15,780 in free travel that she had been provided.
“If we take her to word that she’s still trying to figure it out, it makes one wonder what else we don’t know about what’s going on within her operations, and what she doesn’t know and does know,” Simon said in a press call on Tuesday, raising the issue that it was either an unreported gift, an unreported campaign expenditure or an unreported expenditure by her office, which would mean she was using taxpayer funds for political activities.
“Any of these scenarios, there should be some documentation, and it’s clear that Sears isn’t concerned with providing it, because she’s refused to respond to multiple requests, multiple FOIA requests, for these documents and the evidence of who paid for what,” Simon said.
Sadly, this kind of either sloppiness or indignance only makes it more likely that Earle-Sears gets the full-throated endorsement of the Grifter-in-Chief, for whatever good that’ll do her.
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