On the morning of February 11th, we reached out to Tom Henkel, CHALT’s treasurer, with an email containing a series of errors that appeared in the CHALT-PAC’s year-end report. (You can see the email here.)
Henkel must have had a very busy day, because he went to work amending the report, which he submitted in an electronic format to the North Carolina Board of Elections the following day. (The Board had sent him an email earlier in February noting that CHALT-PAC was now required to file electronically.) The Board received it on February 14th, and it was posted online February 20th, a day after we wrote our piece about the many discrepancies.
The amended report shows some corrections made by Henkel, but there are still a few funky things. Here’s what we noticed:
Small, but the amended report was not marked as amended
A new $3,000 donation appears
In the first submitted report, the donations received from individual donors didn’t add up to the total donations the CHALT PAC says it received. (We added the numbers several times.)
In the amended report, Susan Moffatt is reported as donating $3,000 to the CHALT-PAC on September 20th. (Moffatt also maxed out ($357) to three slate candidates and gave $350 to Adam Searing.)
And we can report that the updated list of donations in the new report adds up to $42,905, the total shown in the January report. Bravo!
There’s a new payment dated November 20
This is odd, because the original report showed payments made in December.
In-kind donations are missing from Julie McClintock
By far the biggest difference is in the amounts that the CHALT PAC says that Chatham County resident Julie McClintock donated for in-kind expenses.
Most notably, remember the Friends of Bolin Creek event in Umstead Park? Then-CHALT PAC assistant treasurer Charles Humble, who also served as David Adams’ campaign manager, paid the $35 fee. His name and address is listed on the report submitted to the Town of Chapel Hill. Julie McClintock said that was a mistake, and the January CHALT PAC filing showed a $35 in-kind contribution from her for that fee. In this filing, the $35 fee is nowhere to be found. That is now a missing expenditure on the amended report.
Remember, this filing is supposed to be identical to the one we reported on a few days ago–the only difference is that this one was submitted in an electronic format.
There’s still no ice cream truck or band listed as an expense
There’s a few things we didn’t point out to Tom in our email correspondence with him—and they are still missing from the amended report.
Those are the missing expenditures that are easily documented as having taken place. As we reported earlier, CHALT touted that an ice cream truck would appear at their September 24th campaign event and give away free ice cream. Pictures of the event show an ice cream truck, and also people eating ice cream. There’s a mention of the ice cream truck on social media, in a newsletter, and in an event flyer. No expenditure appears for the ice cream truck.
The Doug Largent Band played at the September 24th event. Pictures of the event show several musicians. A newsletter mentions the band. There’s no in-kind expenditure listed for the band.
As we mentioned before, the August revamp of CHALT’s website was listed as a $200 expenditure in CHALT-PAC’s January filing. It’s missing altogether in this filing.
The CHALT website went through a major overhaul and was completely redone. Two candidates listed website redesigns— and they each paid substantially more than $200. Who paid for the website overhaul? Was someone paid for the website overhaul?
We don’t know. It’s now missing.
There is no expenditure listed for web hosting for the CHALT website or the newsletter that CHALT sends out.
We searched back through campaign finance forms from 2015 onwards – CHALT’s never mentioned who pays for their website, which is where their PAC accepts donations and where they list endorsements, or their newsletter, which was sent out several times in the weeks leading up to the campaign and contained campaign-related material and endorsements.
In October, we emailed CHALT and asked who paid for the CHALT website hosting. The [email protected] email – which goes to Julie McClintock – responded as follows: “In answer to your question, any CHALT election expense is reported transparently and is fully viewable in the reports sent to the Board of elections…
The political action committee reports all election expenses as well as donors as required by NC Election law and we embrace transparency.”
This piece was written by Geoff Green and Melody Kramer. An earlier version contained an incorrect amount distributed to Julie McClintock in the 1/24 report. Our confusion stemmed from two other discrepancies: the dates change between McClintock’s same-amount donations between the two reports – she’s listed as donating 2753.80 on 9/30 in the 1/24/24 report. That date changes to 11/20/24 in the February report. Also, in the January report, her “election sum to date” is also listed incorrectly, several times. We extracted these figures and used them to make calculations – which made our initial calculations incorrect.