Speaker Tim Moore: Big Spender, But Not So Good At Reporting It

Following up on this post RE Speaker of the North Carolina House Tim Moore's amended campaign finance reports, WBTV investigative reporter Nick Ochsner is on the hunt:

We caught up with Moore on his way into a Cleveland County Board of Commissioners meeting [Moore is also the highly paid legal counsel for the Cleveland Co. commissioners]....

At first, Moore claimed to not be aware of the discrepancies found on his campaign’s finance reports.

“We have always filed everything with the reports as they are due, so I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Moore said.

But as the conversation continued, Moore said a reporter was wrong for saying his campaign had reported years of un-itemized credit card expenses and asking how his failure to itemize credit card expenditures was any different from the un-itemized credit card expenditures that prompted the board of elections’ investigation into Fletcher Hartsell.

“I disagree with your assessment entirely,” Moore said. “Everything on my campaign finance reports are documented fully. That’s a very unfair question and statement you just made.”

When a reporter pointed out to Moore that his campaign had recently amended five years of finance reports, he disputed that.

“You are wrong. I mean, my campaign records have been filed the same way over the years. I just had an audit from the state board of elections—a random audit they do every year—that said everything we’ve done has been fine.”

Moore ended the conversation without acknowledging the amended finance reports his campaign had recently filed as a result of the state board of elections’ audit.

Some of what those amended reports show ... Speaker Moore is a big-time dispenser of steak dinners for unidentified BFFs:

The detailed credit card charges filed with the amended versions of Moore’s campaign finance reports show the Speaker spent more than $7,000 at steakhouses between the fourth quarter of 2010 and the first half of 2015....

For instance, Moore racked up nearly $500 in receipts during the first week of November 2014. On November 4 he charged $216.18 at Sullivan’s steakhouse in Raleigh. Two nights later, on November 6, he charged $246.19 at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in Cary.

A week later, on November 12, the Speaker charged $936.33 at Vinnie’s Steak House in Raleigh.

Moore’s detailed credit card statements and campaign finance reports include more than a half-dozen dinners at Vinnie’s steakhouse.

One dinner, listed as just ‘meals’ on the campaign finance report, charged on February 23, 2015 cost $1,429.84. It is not clear who Moore was eating with or why the meal cost so much.

When asked about the expenses, though, Moore defended the charges that, until recently, had gone un-reported.

“We’ve always been very responsible in the way campaign money is spent,” Moore said.

“If there were meals, that’s where I’m taking out a large group of folks who may come up and visit or other legislators,” Moore explained.

Ah yes! Those blessed Republicans and their red meat!

Republicans in NC House Try To Shut Down Investigative Reporter

Pretty much simultaneously, apparently, in October the state Board of Elections (SBOE) conducted a "random audit" of NC House Speaker Tim Moore's campaign finance reports while a WBTV investigative reporter was also poking around into the campaign reports of all the Charlotte-area members of the NC General Assembly.

Bottomline: the SBOE audit found that Moore had failed to itemize tens-of-thousands of dollars in payments his campaign made with a credit card from 2007 to 2015, a requirement in campaign finance law that was enacted in 2006 (went into effect on Jan. 1, 2007). Tim Moore was both a listed sponsor of that bill in 2006 and voted for it at every reading, including on final passage. Yet he has been in constant and consistent violation of it.

The Tim Moore campaign busily set about amending the reports covering 2005-2015, with the WBTV investigative reporter hot on the story.

That reporter's name: Nick Ochsner. The emergence of Ochsner's name as the target of state GOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse's poison pen (illiterate as that pen happens to be) has now become the story.

Seems that Ochsner, while working in Raleigh and before he joined the team at WBTV, was approached by the Tim Moore people with a job offer: Would Ochsner consider becoming Moore's communications director? Ochsner said of course he might be interested but that he was also trying to relocate to Charlotte, where his wife was working. That ended the job feeler.

Ochsner subsequently landed the job at WBTV, and now he's broadcasting news about Tim Moore's failings at following NC campaign finance law, and Dallas Woodhouse, the new and thuggish Executive Director of the NC GOP, doesn't like it one little bit. Woodhouse wrote Ochsner's boss at WBTV that Moore's interest in hiring Ochsner should disqualify him from reporting on issues related to the North Carolina General Assembly. Seriously.

"It seems to me this is an extreme conflict of interest," wrote Woodhouse, "that should prevent the reporter from covering the man whose office recently rejected him for employment."

"Rejected him for employment"? That's a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts intended to taint Ochsner's motives. But it got worse, and much more ungrammatical:

"Are you aware that just a few months ago he applied to be the house speakers official spokesman? [Not true. He didn't apply. He was recruited.] He was actually interviewed for the position over the telephone he was not offered the job. should you want to see a documented paper trail on this issue I am able to provide one."

WBTV was not impressed by either Woodhouse's attempt at bullying or his writing ability: "Being approached about a job and having a phone call with an interested potential employer is not a conflict of interest. Nick's reporting has been fair and based on facts. I welcome all scrutiny of the facts of the story."

The attempt to silence Ochsner did not stop there. Representative Charles Jeter (R-Mecklenburg), who is the House Republican Conference Chair, emailed all Republican representatives instructing them not to talk with Ochsner: "I wanted to follow up on the Speaker's note from the weekend. If Nick Ochsner the reporter contacts you I urge you to not take his calls." Jeter then repeated the conflict of interest claim concocted by Woodhouse.

And so it goes.

GASP! Some Actual (Blog) Journalism Trumps WBTV Sensationalism

WBTV was just doing its part to trump up fear of The Gay. Its sensationalistic and totally erroneous TV coverage is then vetted by a 20-something blogger with jouralistic chops.