Thank God for Mississippi (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Paul Bookout of Jonesboro, a former president pro tempore of the Arkansas Senate, will report to federal prison on May 2 to start serving an 18-month sentence for spending $150,000 in campaign contributions for personal benefit. A home sound system, golf clubs, liquor, household furnishings, tanning sessions and manicures — you probably already saw the list.

It’s a shame he wasn’t a legislator 80 miles away in Mississippi. As the newspaper at Jackson, the Clarion-Ledger, has reported in detail over the past few weeks, using campaign money for personal expenses is perfectly, disturbingly legal in the Magnolia State.

“While State Auditor Stacey Pickering has received much attention for using campaign funds to purchase a BMW 325i and an RV his family takes to Disney World, he’s not the only state official to buy a vehicle with donations,” the Clarion-Ledger reported last week.

Besides vehicles, statewide officials have used campaign donations to settle tax bills, make purchases at a farm supply store and take trips that include very posh hotel rooms.

The expenditures have been reported, with varying amounts of detail, to the secretary of state’s office. Jim Hood, Mississippi’s attorney general, reported more non-itemized payments during the last four years than any other constitutional officer. Hood made $244,186 in credit card and bank payments, in addition to the $36,489 he paid to himself for campaign expenses that were described only as “miscellaneous.”

It might make you wonder why something that is a violation of federal law in Arkansas is legal in Mississippi. Doesn’t federal law apply across state lines or even east of the Big River?

I’m glad you asked. Now all this research I did to satisfy my own curiosity won’t go to waste.

Bookout’s long goodbye started in the spring of 2013, when a constituent filed a complaint with the Arkansas Ethics Commission. Bobby Hester of Jonesboro didn’t like the fact that Bookout had failed to itemize $50,000 of the $63,000 his campaign spent in 2012 — a year in which Bookout was unopposed. “[T]he citizens of Arkansas cannot tell where one dime of that … was spent,” Hester’s complaint said.

In August of that year, Bookout was reprimanded by the Ethics Commission and fined $8,000 for misuse of campaign dollars, and he promptly resigned his seat in the Senate and his job at St. Bernards Healthcare. A special prosecutor was appointed to determine whether Bookout violated state law, and House and Senate leaders scheduled a refresher course in campaign finance and ethics.

In the spring of 2014 the Ethics Commission fined Bookout another $4,000 for misuse of campaign funds in 2010. Then things quieted down until March 2015, when federal prosecutors — not the special state prosecutor — announced that Bookout had waived his right to have a grand jury hear his case and agreed to plead guilty to the federal crime of mail fraud. Specifically, he mailed to the secretary of state’s office campaign contribution and expenditure reports that misrepresented personal spending as campaign spending.

Bookout did not, then, plead guilty to misusing campaign funds, although he certainly admitted it. He pleaded guilty to mailing fraudulent documents — which is a federal crime, even in Mississippi. But this particular case of mail fraud depended on the fact that Arkansas law makes it a crime to use campaign funds as personal income, and that’s not a crime across the river.

“When Bookout was interviewed concerning his violations of the Arkansas statutes, he admitted he misappropriated the funds and used them for his personal benefit,” Pat Harris, the first assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Bookout, told me in an email. “He knew he broke state law and because he either mailed them or faxed [the reports], that elevated it to federal jurisdiction.”

The Clarion-Ledger reported that there are five other states that still allow personal use of campaign funds, which one observer referred to as “a recipe for ethical disaster.” As I have to remind myself when I hear that lobbyists are still finding ways to treat legislators to steak dinners in dark-paneled private rooms at the finest restaurants in town, at least now they are breaking the law.

It’s been a long time since Arkansas allowed legislators to convert campaign contributions to personal income. Voters approved an initiated act in 1990 that spelled that out pretty clearly.

Is anyone surprised that such a change had to be initiated by voter petition rather than by the ethical impulse of lawmakers themselves? That’s probably what needs to happen in Mississippi too, lest Arkansans with political ambition start streaming across the bridge at Lake Village.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.