Not a muscle in suspended Augusta Commissioner Sammie Sias’s face twitched Friday evening when the guilty verdict was announced at the conclusion of his federal trial.
The jury deliberated just over two hours Friday, July 29, before returning its verdict of guilty of both counts – destroying evidence material to a federal investigation and lying to a federal agent.
Sias, a 67-year-old retired Army sergeant major, volunteered for more than 20 years for his Sandridge Community Association, and according to witnesses’ accounts this week, was a driving force behind improvements made to the Jamestown Community Center in south Augusta.
Sias told the jury Friday that he didn’t do anything to impede any investigation of allegations he misappropriated $150,000 of taxpayer funds given for improvements to the center.
“I didn’t take a dime I wasn’t supposed to,” Sias said. “I spend my own money at Jamestown.”
He didn’t have to directly address the difference between a few of the recreated vendor invoices and receipts compared to the invoices he submitted to the city as to how Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax was spent from 2014-2016. One such item was a $600 washer and dryer that he reported to the city as costing $2,000.
He testified the $137,000 of the SPLOST traced to his personal bank account was because he wanted to save money by using his military discount and those purchases needed to be in his name. The $5,000 that left the SPLOST bank account as checks written for cash were for incidental expenses that always pop up in any contracting job.
But Sias admitted he was the one who was logged onto a laptop computer when thumb drives were inserted, the first within minutes of being served a federal grand jury subpoena on Aug. 5, 2019. And he had the computer when 7,400 files on his computer were deleted. The deletion was discovered after federal agents seized laptop when they executed a search warrant at his home and workshop on Aug. 8, 2019.
Sias testified he wasn’t lying when he told Special Agent Charles McKee III that he had turned over everything he had in paper documents and that the agents had taken all of his electronic devices.
But if he turned over everything, why didn’t the federal agents find the thumb drives that were inserted into that laptop? That was a question Assistant U.S. Attorney Tara Lyons asked in her closing argument.
“He was hiding them,” she said, and that’s why he was nervous and stuttered and lied when McKee asked him if he had turned over all the information.
The deleted documents on the computer were all in a single folder that was deleted in less than a minute, defense attorney Ken Crowder argued for Sias. Some of the same documents were later found on devices Sias turned over. The government wanted to convict Sias for not saving receipts or giving the city receipts for the work done at Jamestown, Crowder said.
But if the city didn’t ask for the receipts, that was its shortcoming, not Sias’. He tried to comply with the federal agents demands the best he could – he even drove the bank records down to Savannah to give to the grand jury as the subpoena instructed, Crowder said.
As Sias told the jury, the proof is what happened at Jamestown, Crowder said. Sias worked 12- and 14-hour days for two years to ensure the projects were finished and finished right, Crowder said.
As the last attorney to speak, Lyons told the jury no one was saying Sias is a bad man or that the improvement projects weren’t completed. But he deleted thousands of computer documents knowing they had been subpoenaed and he then lied to an FBI agent, she said.
“Sometimes good, hard-working people do illegal things,” Lyons said.
Sias, who was into his second term representing District 4 on the Augusta Commission when he was indicted in 2021. The governor suspended him. He will remain free on bond pending a sentencing hearing which has not been set yet.
