Editor’s note: Matt Campbell, the lead author of this piece, is also a key player in the story itself. The attorney behind the Blue Hog Report blog, Campbell submitted a Freedom of Information Act request last summer that first revealed a mysterious $19,000 payment from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ office to a company owned by a friend of the governor. A subsequent FOIA request showed the expenditure was for the now-infamous lectern. For simplicity’s sake, this article refers to Campbell — who is now an investigative reporter for the Arkansas Times — in third person.
The irony of Lecterngate is that nobody would ever have known a thing about it had Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders not worked so hard to hide other information from the public.
In the spring and summer of 2023, the Arkansas State Police began withholding records on where the governor was flying on a state-owned airplane, who was going with her and how much it was all costing taxpayers. Such information had always been publicly available under the state Freedom of Information Act. But after Sanders took office, Arkansas State Police attorneys began denying FOIA requests about her flights, citing safety concerns for the governor and her family. (Security concerns generally aren’t considered a valid FOIA exemption.)
In June, Sanders and others took a trip to Europe for the Paris Air Show, with stopovers in England, Germany and Italy. After the state police refused to disclose the cost of sending deputies on the trade mission, Blue Hog Report blogger Matt Campbell filed a lawsuit for the records in early September.
Campbell may have had the law on his side, but the governor and her allies had the power to change it, or try to. Within days, Sanders called a special session of the Arkansas Legislature to rewrite the Arkansas FOIA, long hailed as one of the strongest state government transparency laws in the country.
By the time lawmakers convened Sept. 11, Sanders was pushing a bill that would have allowed the governor and other top state officials to essentially operate in the dark.
Government agencies would have been able to conceal deliberative documents and communications, meaning anything regarding decisions not yet made. In other words, Arkansans would have the right to know about the workings of their government only after the fact.
In response to this broad attack on transparency, Campbell began tweeting examples of information that would be exempt from public disclosure under the proposed law. Among them was a $19,029 expenditure on the governor’s office’s state-issued credit card on June 12 to a company owned by Virginia Beckett, a D.C.-area events manager and a friend of Sanders.
Ultimately, Sanders’ ambitions to gut the FOIA had to be scaled back in the face of bipartisan opposition. The special session ended a few days later, after legislators passed a narrower FOIA exemption that concealed only records related to the governor’s security detail and travel (along with a separate bill giving a tax cut to upper-income Arkansans). But the governor’s power grab had stirred up discontent among some Republican lawmakers that lingered long after the session was over — and focused new public attention on her spending.
Shortly after that tweet, Campbell heard through the grapevine that the $19,029 purchase was for “a podium.” (To set the semantic record straight: Technically, a lectern is the thing you stand behind while speaking, while a podium is something you stand on, though lecterns are often referred to as podiums.) A follow-up FOIA request turned up an invoice from Beckett Events for a “39-inch Custom Falcon Podium.” Falcon-style lecterns, which have a sleek, hourglass-esque profile, are patterned off a design created by the White House under George W. Bush and have been used by presidents ever since.
On the invoice was a handwritten note: “To be reimbursed –LH.” Unbeknownst to the governor’s staff, however, a state employee had already provided Campbell with a copy of the Beckett invoice, without the handwritten note, a day earlier.
As reporters began asking why the governor paid so much for a piece of furniture, the governor’s office went on the offensive. “These desperate radical left keyboard warriors spread outright lies and try to manufacture a controversy where one does not exist,” Sanders spokeswoman Alexa Henning said at the time. Any issues with the purchase stemmed from an “accounting error,” and the Republican Party of Arkansas “reimbursed” the state for the expense, Henning said.
So it had — but it did so on Sept. 14, three months after the payment to Beckett Events, but just three days after Campbell began asking questions about it. “To be reimbursed” was written on the invoice only after the check arrived from the Republican Party in September, as emails from a state agency soon revealed. (The “LH” on the note appears to refer to Laura Hamilton, an executive assistant in the governor’s office.)
Those details and others were corroborated by the account of an anonymous whistleblower who stepped forward in late September. A former state employee, she claimed to have firsthand knowledge of how people in the governor’s office, including Henning, tried to keep records buried. By the end of September, state Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) announced he was asking the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee to look into both the purchase of the lectern itself and any records newly rendered secret by Sanders’ FOIA rollback passed during the special session.
Lecterngate was national news by October, and the governor’s office’s surly, dismissive denials only added fuel to the fire. Red herrings soon spawned: Did the lectern even exist? Did the $19,000 go elsewhere? Some thought the money may have covered the cost of a jaunt to England for Sanders and her friends during last summer’s trip to Europe, or perhaps first-class plane tickets for the governor’s children. Sophisticated theorists considered the possibility that Virginia Beckett and her business partner had been paid not for a lectern, but to arrange a quiet meeting between Sanders and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to hash out plans for a possible 2024 Republican presidential ticket.
The answers remained hidden, as did the lectern itself: Though it was purchased from the governor’s office by the state GOP, neither Sanders nor any other Republican official used it for months on end. And so things stood for more than six months, until legislators finally released the audit results to the public April 15.
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So how does one end up paying $19,000 for a lectern? The report includes a breakdown.
The lectern cost $11,575, and a travel case was another $2,200. Shipping and delivery for both items were $1,225 and $975, respectively. Beckett and her business partner, Hannah Salem Stone, reaped an unspecified $2,500 consulting fee. (Stone is Sanders’ former Trump White House co-worker, and her company, Salem Strategies, also worked on the governor’s campaign and inauguration.) Because the purchase was made with a state credit card, it included a $554 processing fee.
Auditors said the cost and shipping of the travel case “appeared reasonable,” as did the lectern shipping fee. They were unable to determine whether the cost of the lectern itself or the consulting charge was reasonable, however, because Beckett, Stone and the New York-based company that manufactured the lectern wouldn’t talk. Legislative audit staff “made repeated attempts to obtain the specific custom specifications of the podium from three vendors, and none responded,” the report says, adding that similar models “can be purchased from online vendors starting at approximately $7,000.”
Exorbitant pricing aside, the audit report paints a picture of a governor’s staff that dragged their collective feet during the investigation, failed to provide information requested by auditors and violated state transparency and purchasing laws. Sanders herself wouldn’t meet with auditors.
Auditors documented seven areas of potential noncompliance with state law. They include paying for the lectern before it was delivered, failing to properly record the purchase, selling state property without going through the proper channels, and modifying an invoice months after it was received, which conflicts with a state law about tampering with a public record.
Auditors referred their findings to Pulaski County Prosecutor Will Jones and Attorney General Tim Griffin to determine whether any criminal charges should be filed. While it remains to be seen whether Jones will do anything with the report, it is likely Griffin will not. The attorney general is a reliable supporter of Sanders’ authoritarian tendencies. Just days before the audit’s release, Griffin’s office put out an opinion saying governors are exempt from nearly all state procurement and property disposal laws.
Despite saying last fall that her office had followed “standard operating procedure” for any state purchase when it bought the lectern, Sanders latched onto Griffin’s argument. The governor’s office’s response to the audit declares that the office doesn’t need to follow the accounting rules that apply to other state entities. It calls the audit a “waste of state time and resources” and the report “deeply flawed,” while also insisting it exonerates both the office and the governor. “No laws were broken. No fraud was committed,” the letter says, while repeatedly lying about what the report actually contains.
The day after the report was released, the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee met to review the findings. Sanders did not attend, instead sending two senior staffers to answer legislators’ inquiries.
Lawmakers were split between those who seemed concerned about the audit’s findings and those more concerned with providing cover for the governor. Sen. Mark Johnson (R-Little Rock) apologized to Sanders and her staff and claimed she was “the victim of a weaponized political process.”
But not every Republican was as eager to make excuses for Sanders. Sen. John Payton (R-Wilburn) asked why the governor had not simply admitted that her staffers made a mistake when the issue was discovered and apologized to the public. Deputy Chief of Staff Judd Deere wouldn’t hear of it.
“It was not a mistake,” Deere said. Taking issue with Payton’s claim that the “standard lectern” was not worth the price tag, Deere countered, “it is not a standard lectern; it is custom to a specific height.”
That’s false: The lectern Sanders received was 44 inches tall, the same as a standard Falcon-style model. The audit report describes how the lectern was commissioned to be 39 inches tall — to best accommodate Sanders while wearing 2-inch heels, according to Sanders’ chief legal counsel, Cortney Kennedy — but was not built to those specifications, despite the $2,500 “consulting fee” and inflated price.
Deere also struggled when Sen. Greg Leding (D-Fayetteville) asked him to explain the contradiction between the audit report’s finding that the lectern contained no electronic components and a statement made by Sanders in October that the lectern’s cost was due in part to special audio features.
Deere said there was no discrepancy. The lectern includes a reading light and holes through which sound equipment wires could be run in the future, he said.
Rep. Tippi McCullough (D-Little Rock) asked whether the governor’s office had attempted to help auditors get in touch with Beckett or Stone, since staff had frequent communication with both women during the ordering process. Kennedy told McCullough she had “sent two emails,” one each to Beckett and Stone, at the auditors’ request. The governor’s office sent one additional email to the vendors in January, according to the audit report, but “failed to attach” auditors’ questions.
Rep. Carol Dalby (R-Texarkana), an attorney, asked Kennedy about the alteration of the Beckett invoice to say “To be reimbursed” after Campbell requested the document through the FOIA. Kennedy said adding such a note is a common government practice used to keep track of information.
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The audit report does not exonerate Sanders. But it’s on brand for the governor to insist that it does.
See if any of this sounds familiar: A first-time candidate spins name recognition, grievance politics and Lee Greenwood lyrics into a winning campaign. The leader soon fires or reassigns longtime employees and replaces them with loyal lackeys who have no clue how to run a government. It’s a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to governing. That bull isn’t there to apologize! It’s there to cause a big scene, break stuff and then leave. Among the broken things is maybe a law or two.
Investigations ensue. With signature slack-faced delivery and muscle memory for shameless deflection, the leader accuses the accusers of the real wrongdoing. What do investigators know? It’s all fake news! But it’s also wise to cover one’s bases, so the leader dispatches the contradictory message that the results of any investigation, be it by Robert Mueller or Arkansas auditors, are both a witch hunt and a total exoneration. Repeat this line long enough and loudly enough and it might just take. When all else fails, put out some cringey social media posts and pretend none of it ever happened.
Following Donald Trump’s playbook makes perfect sense for a governor who staked her campaign mostly on her connection to Trump himself. And, honestly … why not? Trump might be in legal peril in multiple courts and jurisdictions, but he’s also the Republican choice for president in 2024. So far, criminal indictments have only supercharged his fundraising and poll numbers.
Whether we’ll eventually see Sanders in a courtroom hot seat like her old boss remains to be seen. Local prosecutor Jones, who was elected in 2022, is relatively unknown and may be wary of taking on the governor.
There’s still the question of federal charges. Attorney Tom Mars, who represents the former state employee who blew the whistle last fall, has hinted on social media that something might be in the works. Asked recently whether federal law enforcement was looking into the matter, Mars responded, “I’m not trying to be evasive, but I can’t answer that.” He noted that a grand jury subpoena explicitly warns against disclosing even the receipt of such a subpoena.