May I summarize the lectern audit in gritty plain language? Why, thank you. I shall.
Here is the unvarnished colloquial way I would put it, offered in a spirit of clearer understanding, and with the proviso that the words coming up in quotation marks are quotations wholly from my mind's creation based on an observer's asserted insight.
Let's call the following a matter of auditors unfiltered:
"We found this lectern purchase to be a curious mess, to the extent that we could find out much of anything considering that Gov. Sarah Sanders wouldn't talk to us, and the vendors wouldn't either.
"It looks like the governor's office paid a dubiously high price for not just the lectern, because the lectern itself was only $11,000 or so (and we say 'only' in the context of $19,000), but for 'consulting fees' to the governor's middle-person associates that we can't begin to assess for appropriateness. We couldn't find any standard fee for paying people who don't make or sell expensive lecterns to provide one.
"There also was a transporting case that, as we priced such things, didn't seem to bear a cost particularly out of line. If you think you're going to be hauling around an $11,000 lectern, though no one has hauled this one around that we can find, you want to transport it snug. We get that.
"And what it also looks like is that the governor's office was intending to pay for all this in the way a blogger discovered it was being paid for--with a state-government credit card and steep transaction fees--until, well, the blogger found out.
"At that point it seems that some person or persons in state government hen-scratched 'to be reimbursed' after the fact on the invoice and then someone in the governor's office called the state Republican Party, newly headed at the time by a gentleman just appointed by the governor, and either directed or persuaded him and the party to cover both the $19,000-plus total tab and the gubernatorial hindquarters.
"One document was shredded, and another was altered. For that matter, the bill was paid before it was sent, which is not the way state government is supposed to do business.
"The whole thing was slipshod and fishy. If we wanted to get technical, which is what auditors do, we would say that there are seven or eight potential transgressions of law or proper procedure that we have tracked as best we could absent cooperation from the key people who blew us off.
"We're leaning heavily on that word--'potential,' when it comes to law violations or procedural errors--because, at this point, we are passing the buck to the prosecuting attorney in Pulaski County.
"We can't handle this hot potato because we're not jugglers; we're auditors. We're boring. We didn't sign up to be special counsels. We're not any Ken Starrs looking in peepholes and raiding closets for blue dresses.
"We think we've adequately explained what happened. What y'all want to do or not do about it is y'all's business.
"We need to get back to the purely financial audit of the volunteer fire department over at Podunk. There's some petty cash we can't account for. We need to send a guy over there to look under the cushions of that ratty recliner in the office."
"The upshot is that we now have confirmed what we already knew, which is that this was a curious, suspicious deal that, in the end, got reimbursed irregularly. We have decided that the lectern still belongs to the state--because the state can't dispose of property the way this lectern was disposed of--and that the Republican Party ought to get its money back.
"The further upshot is that we're likely changing no one's mind. Fine. That's not our role or intent. We're not persuaders, but bean-counters. The ones who shout 'lock her up' will still shout it. The ones who say this is a trivial matter and a political hit will still say that.
"People are going to talk, except for Governor Sanders and these vendors to us."
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P.S.--Otherwise, the media can start bugging the prosecuting attorney. Folks on X can keep making cryptic posts about the FBI supposedly nosing around. And the governor can poke fun haughtily at the lectern issue while looking around for the best aide to throw under the lectern if it comes to that.
And, for the record, note that Sanders responded to the audit with a hip-hop video send-up arrogantly scoffing. And note further that she praised herself for fully cooperating when she did not cooperate at all ... and that she declared the audit at once both deeply flawed and confirmation of her innocence, perhaps not thinking that through.
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 feed on X, formerly Twitter.