Crooked Politics in Kentucky

Politics is a blood sport in Kentucky.Following a tense budget battle with Democrats in the legislature, Kentucky’s crusading new Republican Governor Matt Bevin is now taking aim at Kentucky’s history of systemic government corruption, which the FBI Special Agent in charge of unearthing Democrat wrongdoing in the Commonwealth went so far as to call “an open secret.”  He added that in some parts of the Commonwealth, public corruption was “tolerated” and “ingrained.”

According to the New York Times, Bevin alleges that during his predecessor  Governor Steven Beshear’s tenure “state employees were coerced into contributing to political campaigns and that a contract was improperly steered to a politically-connected company.”  Bevin made his charges public on the same day that federal prosecutors secured a guilty plea to federal bribery charges by former Beshear Personnel Cabinet Secretary, Timothy Longmeyer.

Mr. May’s law firm, Hurt, Deckard & May, has a sweetheart contact with the Commonwealth that would permit them to take an unprecedented (and outrageous) 25% contingency on any final judgement, and that Judge Wingate’s rumored future daughter-in-law, Moira Mulligan, has been employed by May’s law firm since May 2012 as a “summer” associate.  We will let you draw your own conclusions from there.

Apparently, the $870 million figure was calculated by Mr. May and his firm without any third-party expert affidavit, and Wingate simply signed off on it.  Talk about letting the fox guard the hen house.  The amount is absurd given that Poker Stars (which was purchased by Amaya in the summer of 2014) generated only $18 million in revenue from their operations in Kentucky.  You can do the math on the different between 25% of $18 million vs. $870 million.  If that wasn’t bad enough, Mr. May’s firm just announced their intent to file a motion seeking to bypass the Kentucky Court of Appeals and transfer the case directly to the Kentucky Supreme Court citing Governor Bevin’s budget address as the basis for expediting the case.

Finally, and germane to the current controversy in the state, Mr. May, along with Stephen Huffman, also own and operate a lobbying firm called HCM Governmental Relations LLC, which shares the same membership, address and telephone number as the law firm.  Among their clients, May and Huffman are lobbyists for Anthem, who are at the center of the charges against Mr. Longmeyer.

Interesting times here in Kentucky.  We’ll keep you posted as this story develops.

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