Linda Pence’s Tangled Web Unravels: Dem AG Hopeful’s Undisclosed Ties to Pastrick East Chicago Case Go Mainstream

Two days ago, I wrote about the interesting hypocrisy of Linda Pence with regard to the Pastrick “sidewalks-for-votes” case up in East Chicago and Lake County.

The Democrat AG hopeful criticized Steve Carter for spending taxpayer dollars to hire an outside counsel on the Pastrick case, when it turned out that Pence had herself been hired as an outside counsel by the O’Bannon administration.

Moreover, Pence’s tepid (to put it charitably) response to the idea of continuing the Pastrick case was accompanied with statements that she would need to examine the case more closely.

It was not accompanied with the disclosure that she had spent over a year as a litigator in that very case.

Indeed, the outside counsel Pence was criticizing caused her own client to settle out of court.

One out-of-court settlement alone covered the costs to the taxpayers that Pence was complaining about, twice over, and it was a settlement by Linda Pence’s client.

The story made the rounds of the blogs, appearing on Advance Indiana and a few other places.

That story has now gone mainstream.

Read all about it after the leap.

I would take some credit, but I am humble in ways that only salt-of-the-earth Hoosiers from southern Indiana can be. I am just glad to see it getting well-deserved attention.

Northwest Indiana Times reports:

When Democrat Linda Pence announced her candidacy for state attorney general last week, she said she would need to undertake an extensive review before committing to continuing the civil racketeering case against former East Chicago Mayor Robert Pastrick.

Pence, an Indianapolis attorney, didn’t mention that she already is familiar with the other side of the corruption case. Federal court records show Pence represented Rieth-Riley, a paving company that paid $625,000 to settle claims it helped city officials conspire to divert more than $24 million in public money to a 1999 sidewalks-for-votes scheme.

The civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act lawsuit Republican Attorney General Steve Carter filed four years ago labels the city of East Chicago a corrupt enterprise and seeks to recoup the millions spent on the pre-election paving scheme.

“Frankly, that case is one of the highest priorities in the entire office,” Greg Zoeller, the GOP candidate for attorney general, said Thursday.

Zoeller, Carter’s chief deputy, has vowed to continue the fight against Lake County corruption. Zoeller won the GOP nomination over Valparaiso Mayor Jon Costas, whose law firm, Burke Costanza & Cuppy, represented a pair of East Chicago officials who recently settled in the state RICO case.

“When I’m attorney general, I would review that file extensively,” Pence said last week. “I am against public corruption. I would not focus on one county, which I think I’ve seen in the past.”

Pence said she would be willing to entrust the East Chicago case to subordinates or outside counsel if her review identified a potential conflict of interest.

Although Rieth-Riley admitted no wrongdoing in its 2006 settlement, the state had accused the company of playing a central role in a scheme to help East Chicago officials legitimize the paving bonanza that preceded Pastrick’s 1999 re-election. The original civil lawsuit said the company signed off on a phony contract after other contractors already had helped pour free driveways, patios and sidewalks for city voters.

In 2005, Pence filed a countersuit in the case, contending that Rieth-Riley’s contract with the city contained a clause protecting the company from liability if any part of the pact was deemed “contrary to the law.” A year later the company forged a settlement that included a pledge to cooperate with investigators.

“Of the $1.3 million recovered in the RICO case, Rieth-Riley paid a significant settlement of $625,000, which is the largest to date and represents twice the amount paid to outside counsel,” Carter spokeswoman Staci Schneider said Thursday.

More than a dozen of the 27 former city officials and contractors originally named as defendants in civil suit have reached similar settlements.

Got to love her plaintive bleating, “I am against public corruption.”

Whenever a candidate for attorney general has to reiterate that basic concept, one could say that there might just be something terribly wrong.

She’s against it, she says; she represented one of the defendants that settled out of court in one of the most prominent examples of it in Indiana in recent times.

Why was she not forthright with these disclosures from the beginning?

She doesn’t like paying outside counsels, she says; she was one.

Why does she resort to such easily-disproven political hypocrisy?

She doesn’t like paying outside counsels; the settlement by her own client paid for that outside counsel twice over.

Again, why was she not forthright with these disclosures from the beginning?

How can Hoosier voters expect her to be forthright and open and honest as attorney general when she was not willing to be forthright, open, and honest with us in one of her very first campaign appearances?

This post is also available at Hoosierpundit.