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December 14, 2006

How Can You Tell When Bill Sizemore is Lying?

Answer: His lips are moving.

Bill Sizemore is over at News with Views whining about how The Oregonian compared him to O.J. Simpson and saying that he didn't do anything wrong. It was all me and Kelli Highley – oh, yes, and that corrupt evil liberal Judge Jerome LaBarre. And the evil liberal unions were politically motivated and the evil liberal media hates him so they helped the evil liberal unions and it has all been just one massive effort to stop him from giving Oregonians the right to vote on good conservative issues that matter to them. Having just responded to "Anonymous" I'm not really in the mood to have to respond to Sizemore, but being that I'm "confrontational," I might just as well.

Sizemore is a master at obfuscation and deception, and his approach in this article is really classic. He begins by saying some things that are true, and then he cleverly twists the reader into believing things that are not true. For instance, I will give Sizemore the point that LaBarre had a conflict of interest in the case and should not have been presiding over it. He did suppress evidence that might have helped Bill on some points, but by no means all. That said, I could read it in the jury's faces that they knew I was telling the truth about what happened, and the evidence was so overwhelming, while Sizemore's response was so obviously untrue, that I don't think he ever had a chance. So I don't believe the outcome would have been any different with another judge.

Sizemore also correctly notes that the less-than-stellar reporting in the media may have led the average person to believe Sizemore himself forged signatures. That, too, is not true, as I have said repeatedly. And, as I have said repeatedly – and testified in court – Sizemore not only did not forge signatures, he also did not encourage or even tolerate it.

But here is where the twist begins. The case was not just about forgery. It was about a pattern of illegal behavior. He doesn't tell the reader that. Rather, here is where he hopes to create a sense of outrage over the red herring he has placed in the forefront so that the reader will be blinded to the rest of the story (though he cleverly promises to tell the rest of the story, but doesn't).

As for the other charges against OTU, never in this country have such legally absurd claims ever even gone to trial. Who ever heard of a political entity suing a political opponent for all of their campaign money back tripled, because the other side’s tax returns were allegedly inaccurate?.

In case you can't see it, here is what Sizemore left out. First, the "allegedly" inaccurate tax returns were, in fact, inaccurate and deliberately falsified in order to hide the true purpose and activities of the organization. Second, that was not even close to the entire reason the OEA and AFT sued Sizemore's groups. And third, both with regards to the suit and even outside the reasons for the suit, Sizemore personally was involved in a number of activities that were unethical at best and in many cases probably illegal.

Here are a few of them:

1. Sizemore refused to turn over records the Court ordered him to produce, claiming they had been burned in an arson fire at the OTU offices. I personally cleaned up after that fire and noted that it did not affect any of OTU's records, including those requested by the Court. All the records were safe and sound in the filing cabinets in the other end of the building when I quit, and remaining staff knew exactly where they were. All that was lost in the fire were old petitions and other such papers that had no real value.

2. Sizemore laundered $5,000 for the Portland term limits campaign in the summer of 1998.

3. Sizemore skimmed a quarter of a million dollars out of OTU during the 1999-2000 signature drives by running the contributions through his own signature gathering company and then subcontracting the work. The purpose Bill stated for having formed his own signature gathering company was to "protect" OTU from any future problems he might run into with the Employment Division. But he structured his relationships with subcontractors such that they bore all that liability, not him, meaning his own petitioning company had but one purpose – to serve as a means by which he could siphon money off the petitioning process for himself.

4. Sizemore worked out an arrangement with a major contributor to buy stocks in his petitioning company rather than contribute to it so the money would not have to be reported on contribution and expenditures reports but could still be used to collect signatures (or go into Sizemore's pocket).

5. Neither Sizemore nor his subcontractors kept detailed or even general records of their income and expenses so that proper reports could be filed with the Secretary of State according to law. Instead, they relied on me to try to reconstruct what had happened and use creativity to fill in the many blanks, essentially filing reports that were entirely bogus. Despite my repeated requests that proper records be kept, they never were. Sizemore fully understood that the reports he was asking me to produce were bogus, he gave me substantial bonuses for doing them, and he approved turning them in.

6. Sizemore failed to gather sufficient valid signatures to get an anti-crime measure on the ballot for Steve Doelle, and he had guaranteed he would make it or pay back to the money. So long as I was involved, that money never was paid back. (Sizemore also took out a short term $80,000 loan from a political friend, but last I heard had still not paid it back, long after he had promised he would – once it was in his hands, it became "his" money and you were the bad guy if you wanted it back.)

7. Sizemore had several entities through which money could be moved to render it untraceable and he asked us to transfer money from one account to another to another on the same day on numerous occasions in order to hide its source. He pressured me to make up phony groups with good-sounding names that we could use in advertisements and materials as having endorsed us in order to sound more impressive.

8. Sizemore on several occasions lied to big donors in order to convince them to give more money to our efforts. The lies might be what the money would actually be used for, as well as how much money we had already raised. For one very large project, he raised the money several times over, telling each donor that they were paying for the entire project.

9. He frequently had his employees work on projects for one entity while being paid by another in violation of the law. For example, his 501(c)(3) at times paid the salaries for employees working on signature gathering, political campaigning, his gubernatorial campaign, his radio station, and even his toy business.

10. He repeatedly ordered projects listed as having been completed on his 501(c)(3)'s tax return when those projects had never been done. Once, when we were about to be caught by the evil liberal Oregonian, he had me drop everything and create research papers we had claimed to have done the prior year. He never even read them.

12. He lied to the evil liberal Oregonian during an interview while he was running for Governor, telling them he had not filled out a particular portion of a loan application which, if he had filled it out, would have been fraud. The section included a number of yes or no questions with boxes in which to mark your answers. He later told the staff that the reason he knew he had not filled out that portion of the application was because he always makes neat little "x"s that stay inside the box, but whoever had filled out that portion of the loan application had made big "x"s that strayed outside the boxes on the form. Having seen other forms he filled out, I knew that was true – he does make little "x"s. Unfortunately for Sizemore, however, that interview was tape recorded at his own request, and he had given me the tape. When I listened to it, I heard him tell the reporters the exact opposite of what he told staff he had said – he told them he always makes big "x"s and because the form had little "x"s that stayed inside the box he know he had not filled out that portion of it (a psychoanalyst might have fun considering the self-delusional aspects of this incident). Later, when I saw a photograph of the loan application in the paper, I could clearly see that he also had forged his wife's signature on the form. He made me call her to tell her about it.

13. Sizemore on numerous occasions wrote checks from various OTU entities to a mysterious company called "JLC." When I would ask him about these checks he would tell me to mark it down as printing expenses, but he never produced printed material or receipts. Eventually, I learned from a story in The Oregonian, that evil liberal rag, that Sizemore had once tried to sell fishing club memberships to a supposedly well-stocked private lake called Jeffrey Lake that was owned by Sizemore (the fishing club idea had not even come close to being approved by the proper authorities, nor was the lake stocked, and it and the property on which it was located was purchased with money he had conned from fellow church members for a toy company that unsurprisingly went belly up, information I also gleaned from that evil liberal Oregonian newspaper). Hence "JLC" was Jeffrey Lake Company – in other words, Sizemore himself. The JLC checks were money he took out of the organization and put into his own pocket.

14. Sizemore once came to me at tax time and told me he needed a charitable deduction for his tax return. He asked me to write him a check from the 501(c)(3) for the amount he needed to deduct from his return, we would call it travel expense reimbursement, and the check would be back-dated to the previous December. He then signed the check back over to OTU and took it as a contribution to the organization.

Trust me, there is more. Sizemore was by no means a victim here. And yet, he concludes his martyr piece:

In the final analysis, here’s my sin: I have placed measures on the ballot that have given Oregonians the opportunity to decide for themselves what kind of government they want and how much taxes they want to pay? That’s it.

Sigh.

Posted by Becky at December 14, 2006 11:42 AM