State Sen. Janet Cowell tried to use her Senate office to get a Dell lobbyist to help fix a campaign worker's laptop, according to a former Cowell Senate staffer.
The line-crossing between the campaign and the taxpayer-funded senate office was one of several examples of apparently inappropriate coordination between the two operations.
Sherry Johnson, who resigned from Cowell's senate office in February after complaining about demands from the campaign, said Cowell called last winter and asked another Senate staffer, Cindy Garrison, to contact a Dell lobbyist to help repair or replace a campaign worker's laptop.
Cowell said the campaign worker was a North Carolina resident who she was trying to help. Cowell initially said she asked for the lobbyist's phone number but then said she didn't remember if she asked the Senate staffer to call. Garrison said she vaguely remembered the exchange but was certain she did not call a lobbyist and may have called Cowell back to ask if the instructions were correct.
"This is another of those fine lines," Cowell said. "This was someone who had trouble with a laptop, and I knew someone who might be able to help and the (phone) number resided on a database in the office."
Johnson agreed that Garrison did not call any of the lobbyists because Johnson intervened on her behalf, calling Cowell about the request.
"I could not get it to resonate with her that the entire request was inappropriate from top to bottom," Johnson said. "I told her to remember the rule that if it's something you don't want on the 11 o'clock news or on the front page of the newspaper, then don't do it. And then it registered with her."
More after the jump.
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Cowell said she instructed her senate staff to "push back" if they received inappropriate requests and that she and her staff held several meetings to discuss the barriers between the senate and campaign offices.
"We made a very good faith effort," Cowell said. "I think it's very important to have that firewall."
Johnson said the meetings had little effect on the flow of demands from the campaign manager. A September 2007 email shows Jonathan Ducote, the campaign manager, attempting to coordinate the senate office's activities, including proposing legislation that she should support.
He asked the Senate staff to routinely work through him on "style, theme and message."
"I need to be involved in every part of the communications process - to ensure consistency of message development and delivery," Ducote wrote to Sherry Johnson, Cowell's senate research assistant, in September 2007, according to the e-mail Johnson provided.
Johnson questioned the coordination between the two in an e-mail, and Ducote acknowledged in a response that there needed to be some distinction between the campaign and the senate office, "to a limited degree."
Ducote then went on to outline legislation that he wanted Cowell working on during the legislative session. He then wrote:
"I expect, before the short session begins, to sit down with you, Janet, our various consultants and go over the legislation that we talked about two weeks ago and everything else that you (and other staffers) will be working on for her during the short session. While I do not expect the office or Janet to abandon legislation that y'all have invested substantially in but I do expect for it to strategically work on legislation and other issues that complement the campaign's general message and brand and does nothing to harm the brand that we are going to build for Janet during the course of the campaign."
When Cowell was read that passage, she responded: "That does sound inappropriate," adding later, "I'm sure mistakes were made."
Johnson emphasized that she didn't encounter isolated incidents.
"Every day when you went to work, you thought your entire work structure was an ethics violation," Johnson said. "This (Ducote) was not just somebody who got overly enthusiastic about a campaign."
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