Many state Democrats take it as an article of faith that oil companies like Exxon Mobil are active in state judicial races on the Republican side. But the campaign of Democratic Supreme Court candidate Deborah Bell Paseur looks guilty of overreaching when it says in this TV spot that “she is the only candidate not backed by the oil companies.”
In this Associated Press story, Phillip Rawls covered the details of how Paseur’s campaign has received contributions from some of the same sources that she claimed represented “oil money” when they contributed to her Republican opponent Greg Shaw.
For example, Paseur’s campaign received a $5000 contribution from Bob Geddie, a lobbyist for Exxon Mobil among other interests. Geddie’s contribution to Shaw’s campaign is a basis for the claim of the Paseur campaign that Shaw is backed by the oil companies.
Paseur’s campaign apparently knew that the Geddie donation was politically sensitive because it asked Geddie to route the contribution through the Democratic Party, presumably so it would not show up in campaign finance reports as a direct contribution from Geddie to Paseur’s campaign. Below you can see the correspondence on this matter between Geddie and Paseur’s campaign.
On the Expenditures report that his FGA PAC files with the Secretary of State, Geddie lists the recipient of that $5000 contribution as “Ala. Democratic Party (Paseur).” The contribution has not shown up in campaign finance reports for Paseur’s campaign, though the campaign acknowledges the contribution in the AP article and says that they will be returning it.
Bob Geddie confirmed to the Parlor that he had authorized the release of these letters (below) after the Paseur ad came out because Exxon Mobil had not contributed anything to his PACs. “For anyone to imply otherwise is simply not true.” Geddie added that “neither one of them [Shaw or Paseur] had received any oil money.”
Geddie referred to the Chief Justice race between Democrat Sue Bell Cob and Republican Drayton Nabors when he said, “A few years ago, a candidate for the Supreme Court implied that Exxon Mobil was the primary contributor of her opponent. As far as I know, Exxon Mobil limits contributions to candidates to $500, they don’t give to PACs that I am aware of, and they don’t give to any judicial candidates that I am aware of.” Geddie clearly didn’t care for Exxon Mobil being the bogeyman of the election.
Why, I wondered, did Geddie take the unusual step of noting Paseur’s name in parentheses when reporting the contribution made to the Alabama Democratic Party? He answered, “I wanted to remind myself that they had asked me to do it,” i.e. that Paseur’s campaign had asked him to send the contribution through the Democratic Party.
Paseur’s campaign will note that Shaw’s campaign has taken much more money from supposedly objectionable sources than Paseur’s did, and that Paseur has since returned the contributions from those sources. This doesn’t change the fact that the claim in the ad, that “she is the only candidate not backed by the oil companies,” didn’t hold up to scrutiny when it went on the air.
And no matter how strongly Democrats believe that oil companies may back Shaw now and other Republicans for the Supreme Court in the past, Alabama campaign and disclosure laws are such that Paseur cannot prove the claim that the oil companies are backing Shaw.
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