Augusta Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. has filed a response to the Georgia Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission’s amended complaint that accuses him of raising and spending dark money through his self-proclaimed defunct mayoral campaign fund.
Davis’ response, filed by his attorney Ed Tarver, raises even more questions about his financial activities in 2020 with regard to his campaign fund after Davis filed a statement with the Richmond County Elections Board stating that, due to term limits, the campaign would not be raising or spending money.
In the response, Tarver listed minor amounts of money paid out to a Better Me Application Subscription and ESPN+ account as errors that “occurred during the AutoPay Process.”
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However, when it came to larger sums of money, such as over $2,000 spent on a credit card, Tarver’s filing becomes almost indeterminately vague, stating only that the mayor used the credit card for “fulfillment of his elected office.”
When pressed, Tarver, speaking on behalf of his client, Davis, at first said he had no idea what the credit card charges were for, and then later said he believed those expenses were related to trips the mayor made to New Jersey and Florida to support other candidates for office. Tarver said he didn’t know the names of any candidates that Davis supported on those trips.
Tarver said he did not know if any of the campaign funds were used to fund the Mayor’s December trip to the mid-east country of Qatar, which was a much-photographed trip that Davis attempted to keep out of public knowledge.
In terms of the roughly $93,000 that disappeared throughout multiple filings over the years since Davis first ran for office in 2014, Tarver said that his staff could not find such a discrepancy although such an assertion was not made in the filing.
Instead, Tarver attempted to place any blame on volunteers filling out campaign finance reports without any knowledge of what they were supposed to be doing.
“We use volunteers, and those finance documents can be difficult to sort through. People make mistakes; it happens all the time,” Tarver said.
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However, longtime CSRA election campaign organizer Jim Cox begs to differ. According to Cox, who handles the campaigns for a number of local politicians and public office holders including county commissioners, members of the local legislative delegation and local court officials, no serious candidate for office uses volunteers to handle or report campaign funds.
“You don’t ever use volunteers to put together documents that have only your signature on them. It looks like what (Davis) is putting out with this filing is almost like asking the commission, ‘Are you going to believe me, or your lying eyes,’” Cox said.
According to Tarver, Davis is being held to a higher standard and unfairly scrutinized by the ethics commission and the media, but Cox says that is no excuse for what has become a pattern of behavior.
Cox says that the allegations that Davis ran a dark money campaign that used city funds to lobby the public for a James Brown Arena located at Regency Mall; the fund that was called My Brother’s Keeper, which operated as a slush fund; and now the allegations by the Georgia Transparency and Campaign Funding Commission should be cause for everyone in the community to take notice.
“We all know the rules. They really aren’t that hard to follow. I don’t think the mayor can any longer blame this on a typo. There is just too much there,” Cox said.
When first contacted, Tarver asked why The Augusta Press did not contact Davis directly to ask questions.
Hardie Davis has repeatedly not accepted phone calls from The Augusta Press, nor does his office respond to requests for information from the paper.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
