Indicted former state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, accused of converting campaign money to personal use, tax fraud and accepting a bribe, is the nephew of the governor, Asa, and son of the former senator, Tim.
While those are his headline associations, there is a sort of headline metaphor--or my own favorite, at least--for the younger Hutchinson.
It is that he was, in his recent legislative days, the most intense and physical of basketball players in the biennnial House-Senate charity game.
Seemingly obsessed with the supposedly for-fun exhibition, he bowled over colleagues, male and female, routinely leaving them strewn about the hardwood at the Stephens Center at UALR.
Basketball style bears mentioning only because federal court testimony this week indicates that Jeremy lived his private and professional life largely the way he went after a loose ball or a rebound or a bucket, which is to say non-pristinely.
As a basketball player, he played fullback and linebacker.
As a state senator and private attorney, he was ... colorful, let us say.
Both ways, he was prone to collision.
Criminality is for a jury to decide. A personal train wreck can be just a personal train wreck.
Hutchinson's hearing in federal court in Little Rock had to do with the indictment alleging that he converted campaign money to shore up his strained financial situation, and otherwise committed wire fraud and illegal tax evasion in tending creatively to the strained financial situation.
That strain persisted even though Hutchinson got generous retainers, including hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years to make referrals and give class-action prospects to the Texarkana law firm of the politically connected Johnny Goodson.
You might recall that Fortune magazine once wrote that Goodson's firm had long reaped a class-action bonanza because of a "judicial hellhole" in Miller County where millions of dollars got awarded in settlements without trials. The upshot was the allegation that, if you got sued in Miller County on what got certified as a class-action suit, you might as well open your checkbook because there was no other way out.
The Arkansas Times reported Tuesday that Goodson had said his firm never asked Hutchinson for any legislative favor during the paid association. Whether favors or obligations are always implied or inferred in a payer-payee relationship ... that's an ethical question that will hang permanently around a citizens' legislature, at least a non-pristine one.
There were a couple of legislative sessions during which Hutchinson became kind of a favorite of the mild-left because of progressive leanings on issues. It's possible those could have been influenced by financial associations. Getting a check regularly from activist plaintiffs' lawyers could tend to open one's mind on tort reform, I suppose.
Hutchinson also got a retainer from Preferred Family Services, a behavioral health company formerly represented as a lobbyist by an admitted felon, Rusty Cranford. A separate indictment in Missouri calls that retainer an out-and-out bribe, meaning for direct legislative action in the firm's benefit from Hutchinson without any private services for buffering or laundering in between.
That bribery indictment could be mostly a tactic to squeeze Hutchinson into a guilty plea on the wire- and tax-fraud charges in Little Rock.
But Hutchinson argued in his hearing Tuesday that the evidence on those charges ought to be suppressed, which would probably kill one of his federal cases altogether.
He contended the feds only got that incriminating information through his personal laptop that his on-again, off-again girlfriend--who once allegedly attacked him with some kind of stuffed alligator head--stole from him and handed over to authorities.
Initially, the FBI used Hutchinson as an informant, and he was largely responsible for much of the federal probe of legislative colleagues that led to multiple indictments. In time, the FBI turned the tables.
The girlfriend, Julia McGee, testified Tuesday that the laptop was hers--given to her by Hutchinson--and that she had a passcode to it. She readily acknowledged she gave the laptop to the FBI to spite Hutchinson during a falling-out.
She is colorful in her own right. She testified that Hutchinson gave her money from his campaign donations. She said the payments would be campaign expenses only if the sex she was having with Hutchinson qualified as helpful to him in terms of political campaigning.
There also was some unclear and undeveloped intimation by the girlfriend of money for an abortion and some similar vague expression by her of fear of the Hutchinsons.
No follow-up questions got asked and Hutchinson's lawyer declined to answer questions. Hutchinson always professed politically to be pro-life, of course.
McGee also faltered in her testimony, both about dates and by saying incorrectly that she had etched her name in the laptop of disputed ownership.
Hutchinson is scheduled to go on trial in July unless he can crush the laptop, so to speak, before then.
As I said, non-pristine.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/13/2019