Who's Repping Georgia's Lt. Gov. Candidates?
For more than a year, the state's three candidates for lieutenant governor have turned to various local and Washington, D.C.-based lawyers for campaign-related legal work, the Daily Report has learned.
June 27, 2018 at 04:03 PM
5 minute read
Sarah Amico (from left), Geoff Duncan and David Shafer. The Daily Report examined campaign expenditure reports or spoke to the lawyers for the campaigns of Democratic candidate and businesswoman Sarah Riggs Amico and Republican runoff candidates former state Rep. Geoff Duncan and state Sen. David Shafer to see which law firms their campaigns paid for legal services between Jan. 1, 2017, and the present. A caveat: Publicly available reports on candidate spending do not extend past March 31 of this year, and the next report is not due out until June 30. Therefore, the list is likely not comprehensive. Over the past two months, the Daily Report has conducted similar analyses of Georgia gubernatorial and attorney general campaigns' legal spending. The expenditure reports submitted by campaigns do not name specific lawyers or indicate the type of work performed, but in some cases the firms opted to fill in the blanks for us. Sarah Riggs Amico According to the online expenditure reports, Amico's campaign paid nearly $2,900 in legal-services fees between last December and January to Washington, D.C.-based According to her online firm bio, Lindenbaum advises federal, state and local candidates on complying with state and federal campaign finance and election laws. She also regularly represents clients before the Federal Election Commission, federal and state courts and state and local election boards in recounts, canvasses, petition/ballot access challenges and other electoral disputes, the bio said. Prior to joining Sandler Reiff, she was an associate counsel for the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where she focused on election law and voting rights, it added. The bio noted Lindenbaum has been involved in several major cases around elections, including Shelby County v. Holder , which challenged the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Texas v. Holder , which addressed Texas voter identification law. Amico also turned to King & Spalding—paying the locally based firm about $8,585 total in legal services fees over October of last year and this past February. A firm spokeswoman said in an email that Tom Spulak, head of King & Spalding's government advocacy & public policy practice, advised Amico on Georgia election law, helped the campaign submit its documents to open a campaign account and declare Amico a candidate and assisted with other related matters. “This occurred several months ago, and Spulak hasn't been involved in the day-to-day operations of the campaign since then,” the spokeswoman said. Before entering private practice, D.C.-based Spulak served as staff director and general counsel of the House Committee on Rules, as well as GC to the U.S. House of Representatives for 13 years, according to his online firm bio and LinkedIn profile. Geoff Duncan According to the online expenditure reports, Duncan's campaign paid nearly $4,900 in political law compliance fees between last October and March 2018 to global megafirm Dentons , which has one of the oldest political law practices in Atlanta. The Duncan campaign's general consultant, Chip Lake, said it was Dentons partners Benjamin Keane and Edward Lindsey who performed the “general campaign compliance activities." Keane, based in Washington, D.C., is the leader of Dentons' political law team, which generally serves as legal counsel to various campaigns, including some high-profile Georgia candidates in this cycle. The team has worked with Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp and Republican Attorney General Chris Carr. Lindsey joined Dentons' lobbying practice in 2016, working specifically in its extensive Georgia state government affairs practice, according to a Daily Report story about his move. He was a major player in Georgia politics well before that, though, serving as a Republican state representative from Buckhead from 2005 until 2014, including three terms as majority whip. While chairman of the House Appropriations Education subcommittee, he co-sponsored the 2012 Charter Schools Amendment and pushed for its passage as House whip. Georgia voters eventually approved the measure. And in 2014, House Speaker David Ralston appointed Lindsey to serve on the State Transportation Infrastructure Improvement Committee, formed to craft a statewide transportation plan after voters in 2012 rejected the statewide T-SPLOST sales tax to upgrade transit and roads. That plan, Lindsey said in the Daily Report profile, led to the passage of the 2015 transportation funding bill. Neither Keane nor Lindsey could be reached for comment about their work for the Duncan campaign. David Shafer Online campaign reports seemingly do not indicate that Shafer's campaign has spent money on legal fees since Jan. 1 of last year. But Robert Highsmith, a partner at Holland & Knight, confirmed in an email that he is representing the campaign. Highsmith, who heads Holland & Knight's Georgia government affairs practice, served as an executive counsel to former Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue, according to his online firm bio. He also has been assistant GC to the Georgia Republican Party and chief of staff to the Republican Caucus of the Georgia House of Representatives, it added.
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