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12/6/17 — Updates on Sexual Harassment in KY Legislature, Eric C. Conn, & the 6th US Congressional Race

Robert Kahne
My Old Kentucky Podcast
Published in
7 min readJan 4, 2018

Jim Gray Jumps In

  • After months of speculation, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray announced that he was running for the 6th District US Congress seat in 2018.
  • Gray has been the Mayor of Lexington for 6 years and before that, he ran his family business Gray Construction and served on the LFUCG Council as a at-large member (elected by the whole city).
  • Last year, Gray ran for US Senate against Rand Paul, and was pretty soundly defeated (although he did much better than Hillary Clinton, at the top of the ticket).
  • In the 6th District, Jim Gray received more votes than Rand Paul: 52%- 47%, while Andy Barr defeated Nancy Kemper 61%-39%.
  • Jim Gray already has two opponents in the Democratic primary: former Marine Corps pilot Amy McGrath and Reggie Thomas. We did a show several weeks ago with Ben Carter where we talked about those two.
  • The National Journal Hotline reported that John Yarmuth had been actively recruiting Gray to run for the seat. According to them, Yarmuth believed that Reggie Thomas would get out of the primary if Jim Gray entered it. Yarmuth is quoted in the piece as saying “He’s a two term mayor with a 75% approval rating and a 100% name ID. I think he wins fairly easily without a wave.”
  • Gray tacted to the middle more than some of the more progressive folks in the state would have liked during his bid for the US Senate. The statement by Yarmuth was decried by some as dismissive of the other two candidates.
  • For his part, Reggie Thomas tweeted: “A competitive Democratic primary is good for the party and will make me a stronger candidate when I face Andy Barr next November. We have spent the last six months building a Kentucky based grassroots movement that will position me as the strongest candidate to beat Barr” and “Not sure why John Yarmuth would think that. I am in it to win it!”. He doesn’t sound like he’s dropping out!
  • Amy McGrath had a longer twitter essay that I won’t read, but it mostly talked about how Mayor Gray was representative of “establishment politics” and talked about her small donors. Vote Vets tweeted further support, and McGrath ended her tweets yesterday quoting Admiral David Garragut “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”
  • McGrath’s campaign chair, Mark Nickolas, wrote a long facebook essay about Jim Gray running for the seat, and continually called Mayor Gray by the diminutive “Jimmy”, after calling him a friend since 2003. Nickolas closed his post by highlighting Lexington’s murder rate, which “has gone from less than New York City’s the day he was sworn-in in 2011, to nearly double that of NYC last year, and triple the NYC murder rate so far this year.” Coded language!
  • Gray is the favorite, so far as I can tell. McGrath has shown the ability to raise a lot of money, but Gray can self finance and has much bigger name ID and is pretty popular in Lexington. He has a record that I think he’s pretty proud of. We will see!

References

Sexual Harassment in the KY Legislature Update

  • A lot has happened around the sexual harassment scandal engulfing Kentucky Republicans since we last touched on it.
  • On Friday of last week, the Louisville lawfirm Middleton Reutlinger released their investigation into the issue. They said that they could conclude that “no public funds or inappropriate monies were used to effectuate the Settlement”. However, the lawfirm did not have subpoena power, and could not compel several key witnesses to be interviewed. The law firm suggested turning the investigation over to the LRC, which DOES have subpoena power (and is bipartisan). David Osborne, who is running things in the House, agreed to do that, and filed a complaint with the LRC. We’ll see what happens there.
  • Jeff Hoover’s communications director Daisy Olivo filed a whistleblower lawsuit that alleges that she had her duties taken away after she disclosed details of the relationship between Jeff Hoover and his aide. According to Olivo, the woman who accused Hoover was one of Olvio’s subordinates and “shared a timeline of her physical, sexual encounters with Hoover & three years of text messages with him”. Olivo’s accusations went significantly further than what had been reported previously by the Courier-Journal and what Rep. Hoover admitted to: she alleged that Hoover in fact had sex with the aide, and that the settlement was paid by “private funds pooled from prominent campaign donors”.
  • Here is a quote: “Olivo said Wills “believed [the woman accusing Hoover] was the aggressor in the relationship and had forced the Speaker into a ‘submissive’ relationship which was damaging Rep. Hoover’s ability to do his job.”
  • The crux of Olvio’s lawsuit is that on Nov. 1, she met with the LRC’s HR department about the situation between Hoover and his aide, and that on Nov 2, she was told to redirect all media inquiries for Jeff Hoover to a different member of his staff
  • For his part, Jeff Hoover completely denies any of this is true. Hoover said he “never engaged in sexual contact with a legislative staff member” and that the money to pay the settlement did not come from political donors. Hoover alleged that the “key witnesses” that did not cooperate with Middleton Reulinger was, in fact, Ms. Olvio.
  • One piece of evidence that appears to point to the money not coming from donors is that Jeff Hoover took out a loan of $60,000 the day after he stepped down as speaker, and a different loan of an unknown amount of Oct. 27. Hoover said that $60,000 was not the amount paid in the settlement.
  • Meanwhile, Republicans prefiled a bill for the 2018 General Assembly that would create a “tip hotline” to report sexual harassment in the Kentucky legislature. The idea for this is that if the hotline is called, a sequence of events starts: within 24 hours, the perpetrator is notified, and within 30 days the LRC staff will address the complaint. If it’s not resolved, the LRC will take more steps. This tip line would change the current structure, which has complaints being reported to the same body that investigates and reports to legislative leadership (so that is a problem). This injects an independent third party.
  • Additionally, Rep. C. Wesley Morgan filed a resolution to remove Jeff Hoover from his seat. If taken up, the resolution would need to pass the house with a 2/3rd majority. We learned recently that Rep. Morgan’s daughter was the recipient of “inappropriate text messages” from Rep. Michael Meredith, another of the people named in the settlement.

References

Eric C. Conn

  • Many shows ago, we talked about Eric C. Conn, an Eastern Kentucky man who cut off his GPS monitor while pending sentencing for federal fraud charges.
  • He taunted the FBI for a bit when he first when on the lam
  • But he has finally been captured and extradited.
  • A story from a Honduras reporter said that said Conn was arrested by the country’s Technical Agency for Criminal Investigation, or ATIC. It didn’t say when Conn was arrested, but it included photos of Conn with masked agents standing over him. The story said a SWAT unit arrested Conn as he was leaving a restaurant in La Ceiba. And that restaurant was apparently a Pizza Hut.
  • One story said they found him when he turned his wifi on in the restaurant.
  • He arrived at Bluegrass Airport in Lexington on Tuesday and I heard that he said “it’s good to be home.”
  • One of his former employees, Curtis Wyatt has been charged in helping him flee and he has a trial set in February. Conn was also supposed to testify against a co-conspirator in the fraud case before he went on the run.
  • Allegedly worked on the escape plan for a year
  • Conn was sentenced in his absence on the original case, but now he faces escape charges.
  • He pled not guilty to the escape and has a trial date in February
  • He could also face penalties for bond violations on the original case
  • His attorney went on record saying Conn had a lot of guts.

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Robert Kahne
My Old Kentucky Podcast

Written by Robert Kahne

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