OK, we knew Republican Senate candidate Jim Gilmore was in serious electoral trouble, given that he trails by 20-30 points in every poll, and has about a tenth of the cash of his Democratic opponent Mark Warner. Now, it seems, he might be facing ethical questions as well.
Turns out Gilmore filed false information on his campaign disclosure forms, obscuring his ties to the Virginia-based company Windmill International. This is serious business, as Windmill International currently embroiled in a federal lawsuit as two of its board members, Douglas Combs and Hansford Johnson, stand accused of attempting to defraud the government.
Combs and Johnson are both heavy donors to Gilmore’s political campaigns. Their company even launched the “Gilmore4President” web site, when Gilmore was waging his quixotic quest for the Republican nomination. Yet when a federal suit was filed against Windmill International, Gilmore found a slick method of maneuvering around the trouble; he claimed to have worked for a different company named Windmill International.
From the Washington Post:
On the [campaign disclosure] forms, the first filed in June 2007 for his presidential campaign and the second in May after he joined the U.S. Senate race, Gilmore said he was on the board of Windmill International.
Gilmore, who signed his name attesting that the information on the forms was “complete and correct,” reported that Windmill International was based in Nashua, N.H.
But Gilmore was on the board of a Virginia-based company also called Windmill International. The two companies are not affiliated. The Virginia company, headed by Douglas Combs, a former Navy official, is at the center of an ongoing lawsuit alleging that Combs and others tried to secure fraudulent government contracts in Iraq.
The Gilmore campaign claims this was just a “clerical error”. This would be easier to believe if Gilmore and his campaign had not seemingly gone out of their way to indicate that it was, in fact, the New Hampshire company for which he worked:
In 2005, Combs’s company filed a report with the State Corporation Commission listing Gilmore as vice chairman of the company. SCC records do not list Gilmore after that.
But Gilmore’s forms for his Senate campaign incorrectly say he was on the New Hampshire company’s board from December 2004 to December 2007. The Web site of the Virginia company still lists Gilmore as a member of its “team.”
Gamonal said she did not know why Gilmore’s name was on the Virginia company’s Web site. In the campaign’s statement, Gilmore says he served on the Virginia company’s board as an unpaid adviser from May 2005 to June 2006. Gilmore also reported that Windmill International is a “veterans contract group.”
Richard L. Manganello, founder and chief executive officer of the New Hampshire company, which describes itself as a contracting firm run by veterans, said neither he nor his business has had any ties to Gilmore or Combs’s company, which is based at Combs’s home in Rappahannock County.
While the New Hampshire group is indeed a “veterans’ contracting group”, the Virginia company does not deal in veterans’ issues.
So, to recap: Gilmore claimed to have worked for a veterans’ contracting group, based in New Hampshire, from 2004 to 2007, on his campaign disclosure forms.
He is now admitting that none of those things were true.
Falsifying one’s campaign disclosure forms is a relatively serious offense, and Gilmore may face a fine.
But more to the point: what exactly was the nature of Gilmore’s relationship to Combs and Johnson, and Windmill International? What was so dangerous about that relationship that it was worth breaking federal law to conceal?
Gilmore was not named in the federal lawsuit, but as this story breaks, there will be many more questions as to how deep Gilmore’s involvement with Windmill goes.
Sphere: Related Content
No Comments »
Filed under: Bush Powers, Capitol Hill, Clueless, Deserved, Double Standards, Idiot Ideas, Legal Ramblings, Money, Uncategorized
There has been much controversy all over the net about Obama’s birth certificate. Obama claims that he has released his birth certificate, others claim it’s a forgery. The issue has now been resolved as Obama’s father released the real birth certificate today. 
