Mike Sanders used campaign funds to illegally pay phone bills, ethics watchdog finds
Disgraced former Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders broke campaign finance laws by using political contributions to pay personal cell phone bills, according to the state’s ethics commission.
The Missouri Ethics Commission on Friday released a consent order that requires Sanders to reimburse his campaign committee $2,500 after it was found that he used campaign donations to pay bills for cell phones belonging to him, his wife and former chief of staff, Calvin Williford, after he left office in 2015.
Missouri law prohibits political candidates from using campaign funds for personal expenses.
“I am very pleased with this resolution upon payment of restitution the ethics commission will take no further action and this resolves any and all matters that may or may not have existed with the ethics commission,” Sanders said.
Sanders and his wife, Georgia, who is treasurer for Sanders for Jackson County, did not contest the MEC’s findings and agreed to reimburse the campaign committee.
The MEC order shows that Sanders for Jackson County paid cell phone bills totaling $8,680 from January 2015 until June 2017. The monthly amounts ranged from $198.51 to $429.86.
Sanders resigned as Jackson County Executive on Dec. 31, 2015, shortly after voters returned him to office for a third term. He had been Jackson County Prosecutor before running for county executive.
He pleaded guilty to a separate criminal charge of misusing political donations and was sentenced to serve 27 months in custody. He is currently in a halfway house in Kansas City, Kansas, where he will remain until April, according to federal Bureau of Prisons records. He was previously in a federal prison camp in Yankton, South Dakota.
Even after his resignation, Sanders’ campaign committee continued to cover his phone bills. Committee funds paid for a phone he used to place or receive at least 20,000 calls between January 2016 and August 2017, according to the MEC order. His wife placed or received 14,000 calls over that same span. Those included several international calls during late summer 2016. Williford made 8,000 calls, according to the MEC filing.
“There was a lot of disagreement as to which bills were beyond the authorized use,” said Ron Holliger, an attorney representing Sanders in the MEC matter. “For example, Calvin Williford made about 25 percent of the calls that they questioned. We couldn’t get his phone back for obvious reasons.”
Williford was a cooperating witness in the criminal case involving Sanders, Holliger said, and because of that Sanders couldn’t contact him.
“We reached an agreement, if you will, a compromise at $2,500,” Holliger said. “To compromise, you have to admit that you made some calls beyond the authorized use.”
Sanders worked for a time with Independence law firm Humphrey, Farrington & McClain where, among other things, he represented clients under investigation by the MEC. Several times Sanders gave the MEC the campaign-subsidized cell phone number as his contact, the commission order said.
Once considered a Democrat with a promising future in Missouri politics, Sanders was revealed in a 2017 Star story to have used a quadriplegic friend to help carry out a kickback scheme involving two separate campaign committees under his control.
In that scheme, Sanders instructed the friend to cash checks from the campaign committees at a local bank. Sanders would let the friend keep some of the money, and Sanders would take the rest. The money was said to have been used to fund political dirty tricks that Sanders did not want traced back to him. It also was said to have financed gambling trips to Las Vegas, payments on his income taxes and a wine cellar in the basement of his Independence home, among other personal uses, the commission said.
All told, the kickback scheme netted Sanders more than $60,000. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in January 2018.
He also lost his license to practice law.
Sanders’ campaign committee is still active; MEC records show it still has $404,123 on hand, as of its last quarterly filing in October. The two committees that Sanders controlled, and whose pilfering of funds landed him in prison, have been closed down.
This story was originally published December 27, 2019 at 2:19 PM.
