There You Go Again, Maynard

Poor Maynard Thomson. He was the Chairman of the Carroll County GOP, until he had to step down because he filed faulty PAC reports. Since he stepped down on the same day that the cease and desist letter was sent by the NH Attorney General's Office, with the flimsy pretext that he was leaving to serve the Rick Perry for President campaign in some capacity.

I mentioned this incident in a recent column, since Maynard of the deliberately incomplete paperwork is now running for the NH House. He's counting on the fact that no one will remember what happened a year ago in 2011, or care. In fact, he was quite miffed at me for bringing it up, as one can see in his rather hastily penned letter to the editor that appeared in the October 26 edition of the Conway Daily Sun:

She’d also know that the state required me to re-file the forms because I’d done a sloppy, hurried job, and one of the local Democrats complained. There was no effort to conceal anything in the original filings — sorry, but the Carroll County Republicans were passed over when the sinister, right-wing billionaires were handing out the money — and no sanction for my errors, or any finding of wrong-doing.  The forms — originals, and corrected — are available for viewing on line.

As one can clearly see, Thomson admits to filing forms that weren't correctly filled out. As one can also clearly see, despite the oft sung GOP mantra of personal responsibility,  Thomson refuses to take any. He's not to blame for filing incorrect paperwork - a Democrat is to blame for reporting him.

What is interesting about this letter NOW, is that I wrote about his fall from grace on several occasions in 2011, and Thomson said nothing. In GOP Values on Display, which was published in the October 7, 2011 edition of the Conway Daily Sun, I wrote about Thomson's shoddy paperwork:

It seems that under the stewardship of romance novelist Thomson, the Carroll County GOP failed to properly report, itemize, and provide receipts for their expenditures during the 2010 campaign. It seems that some expenditures went on Chairman Thomson’s own personal credit card. According to the AG’s letter (which I have a copy of), the report that was submitted just lumped everything together as one big expense, without itemizing. From the letter: “Your conscious decisions to fail to report the committee’s expenditures for political advertisements until after the General Election and to lump them together with the committee’s cable bill violates RSA 664:6.” 

In an October 6, 2011 diary at the blog Blue Hampshire I was even more direct about Thomson:

As many of us know, political committees, just like candidates, must file expenditure reports as soon as they have taken in more than $500 before an election. Those reports must contain itemized receipts and expenditures.
According to the AG's investigation, Maynard Thomson's first report was filed on Sept. 22, 2010. It reported $10, 842.90 in receipts and $3,218.70 in expenditures. Unless they had a sudden windfall, Thomson was rather tardy in filing this form. About $1200 worth of tardy, in fact. None of the receipts or expenditures in the report were itemized.
The AG's office also learned that Thomson (on behalf of the CC GOP Committee) signed agreements with 2 radio stations to air political ads. He spent $879.75 at both stations. The bill went on Thomson's credit card, dated October 13, 2010. The fiscal reports from Thomson to the state on October 13th and 27th, 2010 do not list the expenditures.
The November 10, 2010 shows a lump expenditure of $6,215.30 for the CC GOP cable bill, advertisements in the Conway Daily Sun newspaper, and the advertisements on Mt. Washington Radio. No itemized anything. No receipts. The AG's office refers to  this as "conscious decision" to fail to report this until after the election.

At the time, Thomson told the Conway Sun that he had "no inkling" that anything was wrong with his reports. As anyone who has ever run for office knows, the reporting is pretty simple and straightforward. One reports the donations coming in, and one reports the expenses going out. Anyone who keeps a checkbook should be able to manage this. Maynard Thomson is an attorney. It's difficult to imagine that he had "no inkling" or that he was incapable of properly filling out the forms.

In any case, I wrote those two pieces in 2011, and Thomson undoubtedly saw both of them, yet he didn't write to the paper to correct me. He didn't send me a behind the scenes letter, or threaten to sue me, as he has in the past.

He's counting on the fact that voters have forgotten, if they ever even knew about his problems with the NH Attorney General's office. Being the stalker/misogynist he is, he feels compelled to attempt to discredit ME for reminding everyone of his borderline criminal actions.

It's fortunate for Mr. Thomson that the state doesn't enforce the rules of their rather shoddy reporting system.

But - as granny used to say, a leopard doesn't change his spots. I was in Concord yesterday at the Secretary of State's office, going through candidate reports, when I came upon the only report Thomson has filed since the primary. It seems that old dog is up to the same tricks:

This is Thomson's October 17 report. As you can see, he's claiming a sum of $3, 615. 37 as being brought forward from the donations he received during the primary, and this is listed as his total receipts  taken in to date, for the campaign. Receipts is the term used for contributions.

Thomson listed $655.27 in expenditures for this report. On the line asking for total of expenditures previously reported, he's claiming zero. The receipts and expenditures are supposed to be itemized. Under receipts he has a zero. Under expenditures  he has written: "see attached." There was no attached.  There you go again, Maynard.

There's also a rather epic math failure here. Instead of subtracting the amount of expenditures from the receipts, Thomson added the expenditures to the receipts, and listed the amount as a deficit balance. If he'd subtracted the expenditures (as he is supposed to),  he'd be reporting a surplus balance of $2960.10.

Thomson has been attempting to belittle my intelligence for years, and I'll confess I did fail remedial math once in high school, owing largely to a lack of motivation on my part. Thomson trumpets his education and experience proudly on his website:

 After graduating from law school, I became an Assistant Attorney General in Ohio. From there, I went to the Kennedy School at Harvard, where I got a Masters in Public Administration.
We then went to Washington, where I worked for the Federal Trade Commission. That was where I developed my enduring interest in the economics of health care, and my conviction that there’s almost no problem that won’t be made into a far larger problem by a well-intentioned, government intervention.

All that education, yet seemingly he can't subtract, and clearly he will not properly fill out a simple campaign finance report. Do you really want to have him working on our state budget????