According to AL.com and multiple Yellowhammer sources, the Alabama Attorney General’s office has subpoenaed the Alabama Republican Party’s financial records. Members of the Party’s steering committee told Yellowhammer last week that the subpoena appears to be part of a grand jury investigation into the ALGOP’s campaign finance activities during the 2010 election cycle when now Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard was the Party’s Chairman.
An internal financial review conducted at the request of current ALGOP Chairman Bill Armistead when he came into office in 2011 has been a hot topic among GOP circles for much of the past year.
The majority of the speculation regarding Hubbard’s tenure as Chairman centers around a contract a Hubbard-owned company received to do printing for one of the Party’s direct mail vendors. Birmingham News reporter Chuck Dean wrote in late November that Hubbard appears to have made just over $9,000 personally from the contract, but also noted he had given $40,000 of his personal money to the Party’s 2010 election efforts.
Hubbard has requested on numerous occasions for the documents to be released. “I have nothing to hide and that, whatever it is – and it’s not an audit – shows we did nothing improper,” he told Dean.
The ALGOP’s 21-member steering committee chose to keep the records internal up until last week when they voted to allow members of the public to review the documents at the Party’s headquarters and agreed to comply fully with the Attorney General’s requests.
Don Wallace, a Tuscaloosa-based CPA, is one of the members of the Steering Committee. “The Party’s audit report for 2010 as requested by the Chairman…received a clean opinion from the auditors,” Wallace told Yellowhammer via email. “There were two related Party transactions disclosed in the report’s footnotes for business conducted with the Speaker’s company and [political consultant] Chris Brown’s company. There was no allegation of illegality in the audit,” he said.
Now with the AG’s subpoena, the Party’s finances are about to get an even more in-depth review.
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