A congressional candidate with the backing of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may be facing an ethics investigation.
Emails reviewed by the Daily Poster revealed the Ohio state auditor’s office has reviewed allegations from an April 14 news article and recently referred the matter to the state ethics commission, Newsweek reported Tuesday.
Shontel Brown, a candidate in the Democratic primary for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District, voted as a Cuyahoga County councilwoman to approve more than $17 million in government contracts to the Perk Company, which is run by Brown’s partner, Mark Perkins, according to an April 14 article by the Intercept. Brown also received $13,000 in campaign donations from the Perkins family and Perk’s current owners, the Cifani family.
HILLARY CLINTON ENDORSES RIVAL TO NINA TURNER IN OHIO SPECIAL ELECTION
“This is certainly a shocking revelation and it raises very serious ethical and legal questions,” Kara Turrentine, Turner’s deputy campaign manager, said in an email to the Washington Examiner.
Ohio law prohibits public officials from “authoriz[ing] or employ[ing] the authority of the public official’s office to secure authorization of any public contract in which the public official, a member of the public official’s family, or any of the public official’s business associates has an interest.” Violation of this law is a state felony that may result in prison time.
Representatives for the state auditor’s office, Brown, and Clinton did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.
Clinton endorsed Brown last month, passing over Nina Turner, another candidate in the race who started as a “Ready for Hillary” signee before throwing her support behind Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy in 2016.
“I’m proud to endorse @ShontelMBrown for Congress in the OH special election. Shontel made history as the first Black woman to chair her county Dem party, and she’ll work to help her state and our country recover from COVID,” Clinton tweeted on June 16, inviting her followers to “join [her] in supporting” Brown by linking to an ActBlue donation page.
Brown accepted the endorsement, calling Clinton “an inspiration to [her] for decades.”
“She is a champion for working families,” she said. “I’m thrilled and honored that she endorsed our campaign for Congress.”
Turner, a former Cleveland city councilwoman and Ohio state senator, supported Clinton’s candidacy throughout 2014 before shifting to back Sanders in 2015.
“I’m very attracted by his message and his style and that he has held pretty much strong on his beliefs, and the world is catching up with him,” she said in November 2015, according to multiple outlets.
Just 12 hours after Clinton announced her support for Brown, Turner saw her best fundraising day of the campaign to that point, enjoying a “six-figure fundraising haul” from the time Clinton endorsed Brown at 12:07 p.m. on June 16 to midnight on June 17.
“This movement is focused on lifting up working families and building a future where all of us can thrive, not just the wealthy and well-connected,” Turner said in a June 17 statement. “I am extremely proud to be running a campaign that is 100% focused on the issues that affect the working people of my district. If elected to Congress, they will be my only special interest, and I am grateful for their support.”
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Turner and Brown are vying for the seat vacated by former Rep. Marcia Fudge, who left Congress to join the Biden administration as the secretary of housing and urban development. The primary is set for Aug. 3.
The seat is not expected to be competitive in the general election. It has a partisan voter index of D+32, meaning the district trends more Democratic than the United States as a whole, according to the Cook Political Report.
