Politico: How Perdue’s power benefits his friends
Sonny Perdue has a long history of ethics controversies, notably when he signed a law giving himself a tax break. | AP Photo
By Ian Kullgren
03/13/17 05:08 AM EDT
Sonny Perdue has long mixed personal and political business to benefit his friends and business associates — and he’s on track to do it again.
President Donald Trump’s nominee for Agriculture secretary, agribusiness tycoon and former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, has long mixed personal and political business to benefit his friends and business associates — and he’s on track to do it again, even before he’s confirmed to the Cabinet post.
A POLITICO examination of Perdue’s list of appointments when he was governor — from 2003 to 2011 — found more than a dozen instances when he gave positions to business associates and campaign donors, and other occasions when he rewarded his state staff with opportunities in his agriculture and shipping empire after he left office.
And though Perdue has yet to face a confirmation hearing, he’s already lined up an associate with a job in the Trump administration. Heidi Green, a partner of Perdue’s shipping business who also worked for him in Georgia state government, landed a political appointment as senior adviser at USDA in January. She’s now being mentioned as a likely candidate to serve as his chief of staff.
Perdue, tapped by Trump to run USDA in January, has a long history of ethics controversies, notably when he signed a law giving himself a tax break, and when he was found to have violated Georgia law by funding his campaign accounts with contributions from his private enterprises. He still hasn’t faced a confirmation hearing, largely because his ethics paperwork has been under review. The Senate received his ethics disclosure forms — promising to put his assets into a blind trust — late Friday after weeks of delay.
Whether any of that will matter when it comes to a Senate vote remains to be seen. But when Perdue finally does appear in front of the Senate Agriculture Committee, he’s sure to face questions about how he’ll manage a $150 billion agency with thousands of employees across the country, and whether some of his practices in Peach State politics will follow him to the federal level.
“That good-old boy system is definitely embedded and definitely entrenched here,” said Sara Henderson, the public policy director for Common Cause Georgia, a nonpartisan government watchdog group. “And I think former Gov. Perdue is going to bring that to the federal government.”
A spokeswoman for Perdue and Green did not respond to a request for comment from Perdue. She provided a comment from Green, who said Perdue aimed to create jobs and help the economy.
“The governor has spent most of his life in public service working to grow jobs and opportunities for people,” Green said through the spokeswoman. “Even in the private sector this was the focus of his work. He is proud of what he accomplished in Georgia as governor and, if confirmed, he hopes to continue efforts to improve conditions in rural communities around the country.”
Despite his ethics run-ins, Perdue’s chances of being confirmed are good. He’s popular with farm industry power brokers, who welcomed his nomination after pushing back on a number of other candidates being considered by Trump. Republicans on Capitol Hill like him, and even Democrats concede Perdue is qualified for the job.
As the first modern Republican to hold the Georgia governorship after more than a century of Democratic rule, Perdue faced his share of controversy for securing good deals for himself. When he took office in 2003, he refused to put his businesses in a blind trust, a decision that caused many entanglements over the next eight years.
“I am a small business owner, I’m in the agri-business,” Perdue said in a debate while running for reelection in 2006. “That’s about as blind a trust as you can get. We trust in the Lord for rain and many other things.”
Yet Perdue faced 13 complaints to the state ethics commission during his years as governor, two of which resulted in findings that he broke state ethics laws. In 2002, Perdue was caught funneling illegal amounts of money from his private businesses into his campaign account and, in 2005, Perdue was forced to pay a $1,900 fine for improper campaign contributions and failing to correctly report the use of his private plane for a campaign event, records show.
But it wasn’t just Perdue himself who benefited. POLITICO’s analysis of Perdue’s appointments shows the extent to which he mixed his business and government dealings, often to the advantage of both sides.
Take Green, who was recently appointed to a top role on the so-called beachhead team for USDA. In 2008, while serving as the second highest-ranking economic development officer in Georgia, she helped arrange a meeting between the president of one of Perdue’s grain companies and state development and agriculture officials. “FYI … this is the Gov’s company,” she told state officials in an internal email obtained by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
In 2010, near the end of his second term, Perdue appointed Green to the top economic development spot, a year after he personally met with officials at the Port of Savannah to discuss private business opportunities. In 2011, after he left office, he started an export consulting company with Green called Perdue Partners, a “global trading company that facilitates U.S. commerce with an emphasis on the export of U.S. goods and services through trading, partnerships, consulting services and strategic acquisitions,” according to company promotional materials.
That company became the nexus of other controversies rooted in the governor’s office, including Perdue appointing his cousin, David Perdue — now a U.S. senator — to the Georgia Ports Authority in 2010. In 2011, David Perdue became a founding partner of Perdue Partners along with Sonny Perdue, Green and another former state official, conducting business that critics say put him in conflict with his public role and possibly gave the company an unfair advantage.
Sonny Perdue, in his ethics disclosure forms, indicated Perdue Partners is currently worth less than $1,000.
A spokeswoman for David Perdue said he was appointed to the board not because of family connections, but because of his experience as a Fortune 500 CEO with global business experience.
“Senator Perdue was a passive investor in Perdue Partners, he has since severed all business ties and is solely focused on serving the people of Georgia in the US Senate,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.
Green, for her part, is now a senior executive assistant, the highest rung in the federal government pay scale, making between $124,000 and $187,000 a year, according to government documents.
Perdue’s habit of helping friends started early on. In 2003, when he needed to appoint someone to the state’s Agricultural Exposition Authority (a position that’s unpaid but comes with a small expense account), he turned to Danny Brown, the President of AGrowStar, a grain marketing company that Perdue had purchased three years earlier. In a statement announcing the appointment, Perdue said Brown and another appointee “will have key roles in boosting our state’s economy.”
He did not mention that Brown was working to boost his private economy at the same time: AGrowStar, under Brown’s leadership, opened two new facilities the same year, including one in Perdue’s hometown of Bonaire, Ga., according to the company’s website. The acquisitions increased the company’s total grain capacity to nearly 2 million bushels.
Perdue, in his statement announcing Brown’s appointment, took the opportunity to promote his own company, calling it “one of the state’s leading grain marketing facilities.”
Brown, in an interview, said he had already served on the board — an expo official confirmed he had previously served from 1994 to 2001 — and that Perdue asked him to serve another term.
“He’s a fine fellow, and I’m not saying that because I work for him,” Brown said.
Also in 2003, Perdue appointed another business associate, Jacob Redmon, to be the agriculture representative on the Georgia Development Authority. Redmon is general manager for Houston Fertilizer, another company that Perdue owns, and is listed on corporate filings for 2003.
In addition to his family and his business associates, Perdue also rewarded donors with appointments to positions in state government. Two members of the state board of education, Mary Sue Murray and James A. Franklin, were appointed by Perdue in 2003 after they gave him $1,000 and $3,240, respectively, during his first run for governor, according to a database of campaign finance records kept by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
“Apparently he thought I would do a good job on there,” said Franklin, a retired real estate developer and Army veteran. Franklin said he hosted several events for Perdue during his first gubernatorial campaign, but didn’t think it had anything to do with the governor’s decision to appoint him.
“To the best of my knowledge it wasn’t,” about the money, Franklin said. “As far as I know, Sonny never did anything unethical.”
Murray said she was qualified to serve on the board, having been a public school teacher, assistant principal and received a Ph.D. in educational leadership from Georgia State University. But she didn’t rule out that her support of Perdue during the campaign may have factored into his decision.
“I would hope I wasn’t just put on the board because I supported Sonny, but that’s part of it,” Murray said. She added: “In politics in Georgia, a thousand dollars is peanuts to make a jump.”
There was also Clarence Victor Beadles, the CEO of a lumber company in Moultrie, Ga., who gave Perdue $2,500 in 2002 and got an appointment to the Georgia Forestry Commission the following year.
And there was John Pearson, a contractor in Cumming, Ga., who gave Perdue $8,000 in 2002 and got an appointment to the Construction Industry Licensing Board in 2003.
Beadles and Pearson did not respond to requests for comment.
To be sure, the links between Perdue’s business and public life went beyond personnel. Perdue signed an executive order in 2003 prohibiting state employees, including the governor, from accepting gifts from lobbyists that exceeded $25. State records show Purdue later received more than $23,000 worth of gifts above the $25 threshold, including a $12,000 private jet ride to New York from an IBM lobbyist, a $5,000 jet ride from a tobacco lobbyist and scores of football tickets.
But the controversy most likely to dog Perdue in confirmation hearings came in 2004, when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that his lawyer intervened on a piece of legislation to give Perdue a $100,000 tax break on a piece of land he bought in Florida.
The bill, signed by Perdue in 2005, gave land buyers temporary relief on capital gains tax in Georgia if they sold land in Georgia and purchased land in another state. During a last crush of bills at the end of the legislative session, state Rep. Larry O’Neal, who was also Perdue’s lawyer, introduced an amendment to make the bill retroactive for a year — covering Perdue’s land near Disney World.
In the ethics paperwork he filed Friday, Perdue said he would recuse himself from decisions that could affect his grain company, AGrowStar, until a promissory note from the company is repaid, and resign from positions with a number of groups, including the National Grain and Feed Association and Georgia Agribusiness Council.
Ethics watchdogs are skeptical.
“This isn’t like draining the swamp,” said Scott Faber, a lobbyist for the Environmental Working Group, a watchdog organization that’s been critical of Perdue. “This is like putting the original swamp monster in charge.”