Special Prosecutor Investigating the Financial Reports of Independent Scott York

Independent candidate for Chairman of the Board in Loudoun is under investigation for irregularities in his campaign’s financial reports.  Commonwealth Attorney Jim Plowman has confirmed that he has recused him and turned the investigation over to Arlington Commonwealth Attorney Theo Stamos (D).  The case was turned over to her in August and she said she hopes to complete her investigation “sooner rather than later”.

Local citizen Sally Mann filed the complaint against York for violation campaign finance laws after finding 36 mistakes in York’s 13 campaign finance reports.  She believes York violated the laws in the following ways,

-Vague and incomplete information regarding reimbursements.
-Failing to list the address of named entities for which reimbursement was sought.
-Aggregating reimbursements not of the same nature.

Mann’s complaints include,

“Reimbursements may not be utilized to hide information required to be disclosed or to mask individual expenditures. Any aggregation must be for the same named payee and for the same properly identified expense. For example, the reimbursement for website development and lunch on 9/23/2014 are not in the same nature of expenditures for the same service or product. Who was paid for the website? Who was the real payee? What were the dates of payments? Etc.”

Predictably, Independent York blamed it all on politics,

“I’ve heard that a complaint about my campaign reports has been lodged as a thinly-veiled effort to distract the voters from the issues in this campaign,” the chairman told the Times-Mirror.

Scott York last tinkered with his financial reports two days ago, on Sunday.  One has to wonder why.  Was he trying to hide something?

More at the Times-Mirror here. 

Photo credit: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post