And boy, DID he. Former governor Mike Easley was on the stand at the state elections board hearing for five hours today, fielding questions on everything from home repairs and odd car-lease deals to fundraising and campaign finance law.

If you’re looking for details, you’ll find an embarrassment of riches on Twitter, where the #easley tag was a firehose of blow-by-blow coverage today.  My noon update on the State of Things is here.   For my non-audio-type readers, here’s a (relatively) nutshell recap:

On home repairs:  McQueen Campbell had accused Easley of directing him to file a bogus campaign invoice to cover Easley’s home repair bill. Easley said renters from his own campaign did the damage, so the campaign should rightfully have covered it, but he could easily have charged the repairs to the campaign under the prevailing law, so no bogus invoice was needed.

More to the point, Easley claims he was misled by Campbell about the bogus invoices. He says Campbell told him he wasn’t getting paid quickly enough for flights, so they decided to bill the campaign for blocks of flight time in advance.  As far as he knew, Easley said, the invoices had nothing to do with home repairs.  As for the conversation Campbell recounted, Easley said it “never, ever happened.”

"We didn’t have any conversation about that. I didn’t say anything to him that he could have implied that - I don’t know where he got that idea, but he did not get it from me."

Easley also said he had asked Campbell more than once if he’d been paid for all his flights, and Campbell told him that he had. But Campbell told the board he had not been paid.  Because all these conversations were on the phone with no witnesses, it pretty much comes down to he said/he said.

On Mike Jr’s car:  Easley insisted that billing his son’s Yukon to the campaign was appropriate because his son was working for the campaign when he drove it.  He says Mike Jr. did research and traveled with his dad, reporting to campaign director Jay Reiff, who, coincidentally, won’t be testifying. 

When asked about whether he’d paid Robert Bleecker for the use of the car from 2003-09, Easley said he'd paid off the balance this ear, and he believed his personal assistant Beverly Walker had made annual payments along the way. Testifying later, Walker said she never made any such payment.

On fundraising:  When asked about the “Governor’s Fund” label on some checks to the NC Dem party, Easley said it was just a way to keep track of his contributions toward his party’s coordinated campaign.  NC Dem attorney Jim Cooney also said it was an internal accounting notation, not an indication of some secret party fund on which the governor could draw at will. 

This may sound arcane, but it matters – a lot.  Under campaign law, donors can give a candidate only $4K per primary and $4K per general election.  But they can give unlimited amounts to the party, which can allocate those dollars to candidates as it sees fit.  An internal planning memo from campaign chief Jay Reiff to treasurer Dave Horne suggested that maxed-out donors could be encouraged to give to the party instead, but it also expressed concern that donors wouldn’t be as generous unless they were reassured the money would eventually be used to help Easley.  

The board wanted to know if Easley had knowledge of a coordinated plan to send excess donations to the party, with a wink and a nod that the money would be directed back to Easley.  But if such a plan existed, Easley says, he didn’t know about it – he was “not in the loop” on such things.

In fact, Easley went to great pains to point out just how out of the loop he was, claiming he didn’t even know where his campaign HQ was located, and that he didn’t talk very often with Reiff.  When board member Bill Peaslee pushed him on that, Easley got testy, saying the bigger the campaign is, the further away from it the candidate is, and insisting he hired staff to deal with things because he was too busy as governor to spend time haggling over finances and paperwork. 

For the record, insiders who’ve observed Easley over his 16 years in public office are largely skeptical about his claims of disconnection.  No, he didn’t like fundraising – many candidates don’t – but he was said to be very much on top of his message and his media presence. And for most campaigns, media is the central expense for which they need to raise money. 

Seems to me it’ll be tough to prove the governor did or did not have an established line of credit at the NC Dem party unless someone has balance sheets that weren’t entered into evidence at the hearings.  Which seems, well, unlikely.

What to watch for:

As of mid-afternoon, chairman Larry Leake said he wasn’t sure whether the board would recall McQueen Campbell to the stand.  Easley’s testimony today directly contradicted what Campbell told the board Monday.  Leake said the two couldn’t be reconciled.

But by 4:30, Leake said the board would call only one more witness – Scott Falmlen, the Executive Director of the NC Dems during the time in question.  He’s on for 9:30 Thurs.  Falmlen’s got a history of his own -- most notably in FL, where he left the party chairmanship (some say under duress) after a particularly rough governor’s race. More on that here. 

When asked, the assorted counsel in attendance said they had no plans to call additional witnesses, so Leake says he expects the board will have a decision by tomorrow night.  That could range from no action to a steep fine to turning the case over to the state for further investigation.  Since said investigation is already underway, the third option seems likely– especially since the three out of five board members who were appointed by Easley may not want to appear biased on his behalf.

Best moments

• Easley said his conversation with Bleecker about what was owed on Mike Jr.’s Yukon was truncated because Bleecker called while Easley was vacuuming out the fireplace, and the hose came off the vacuum, so Easley had to hang up.  (Who takes a phone call when they’re vacuuming?)
• Easley’s testimony was interrupted by a ringing cell phone, which used to be one of his pet peeves as governor.  Except this time, the phone belonged to SBOE Exec Director Gary Bartlett, and the ringtone was the Carolina fight song.  Board Chair Larry Leake: “Feel free to stand if you want to." 
• Board member and former GOP flack Bill Peaslee asked Easley why a campaign car would be at the mansion.  Easley: “Well, it’s gotta go home with somebody.”
• Easley on a campaign finance plan that referred to his wife’s “untapped” political popularity. "Go tap her. Leave me alone."
• On Campbell’s failure to bill to the campaign for his air services: “He’s not an imbecile.”

More tomorrow, when it all wraps up.  (We hope.)

Comments?  Drop me a line.