CONWAY -- The FBI questioned a lobbying associate of former state Sen. Gilbert Baker for about four hours after nursing-home owner Michael Morton suggested she was the one who had asked him in 2013 to support Michael Maggio's judicial campaign even as Maggio was presiding over a negligence lawsuit against Morton's Greenbrier nursing home.
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Linda Leigh Flanagin spoke of the meeting with the FBI during a deposition she gave in August 2015 to attorneys in a more recent lawsuit that accuses Morton and Baker of conspiring to funnel contributions to Maggio's since-halted campaign for the Arkansas Court of Appeals. The corruption lawsuit contends the contributions were in exchange for giving Morton's Greenbrier nursing home favorable treatment in the earlier negligence lawsuit.
She said an FBI agent called her "right after the first article in the newspaper" appeared in March 2014 about the contributions Maggio's campaign got from several Morton-financed political action committees.
"He asked me if I wanted to talk to him, or if I wanted to get an attorney," Flanagin recalled.
"And of the two choices, you chose to get an attorney?" attorney Thomas Buchanan asked her.
"Right," replied Flanagin, who was represented by attorney Paul James during the deposition.
Flanagin said two FBI agents and an assistant U.S. attorney were at the July 2014 meeting. In 2015, she got a federal subpoena for some documents.
Flanagin also got a proffer agreement in which the federal government guaranteed her at least limited immunity, according to a transcript of her deposition. The proffer would have prevented prosecutors from using her own statements against her later in court.
"Did they ask you about the article where Mr. Baker denied being at the Brave New Restaurant with you?" asked Thomas Buchanan, an attorney for the family of a woman who died at the Greenbrier home in 2008.
"I think he [an FBI agent] kind of said something about all the fingers point to you," Flanagin replied.
Flanagin, however, said she doesn't remember seeing Morton at the restaurant, though she doesn't deny that they could have seen each other there.
Still, she said, she is not the one who would have sought Morton's support. She said she never solicited money from Morton for any political candidate.
"If Gilbert and I were working together, Gilbert talked to Mr. Morton," she said.
In March 2014, Morton told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he ran into a woman who worked for Baker at Brave New Restaurant in Little Rock -- which he later said was a reference to Flanagin.
Baker at first denied being at the restaurant that day, and Morton first said he didn't know if Baker was there. Since then, Morton has said he saw both Baker and Flanagin at the restaurant that day.
State Desk on 07/04/2016