Ellsworth Ethics Hearing Wraps Up

The ethics hearing into former state Senate president Jason Ellsworth’s contract dealings with a longtime business associate closed Saturday with conflicting arguments about whether the lawmaker deliberately skirted disclosure laws. 

Special Counsel Adam Duerk argued that Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, had tried twice in 2024 to award government work to former business associate Bryce Eggleston. Duerk said in both instances Eggleston appeared unqualified. The senator’s final attempt, which was at the crux of the three-day ethics hearing, involved a potential $170,100 payout for bill analysis that legislative staff testified could be done by government employees at a lower cost.

“You cannot contract your way around ethics. That is the foundation for the work that you do here as public servants,” Duerk told members of the four-person Senate Ethics Committee.

After an investigation and news coverage drew public attention to the contract, Eggleston said he no longer wanted the work. Eggleston did not appear before the committee, though the committee issued a subpoena for him Friday.

The committee, which consists of two Republicans and two Democrats, will now craft findings to present the Senate as a whole. If Ellsworth is found to have violated conflict-of-interest disclosure laws, punishment could range from censure to expulsion, the latter of which requires a two-thirds majority vote.

Ellsworth’s attorney, Joan Mell, told the ethics committee that the investigation into the Senate’s 2023 president wasn’t impartial. Ellsworth never testified before the committee and monitored the proceedings via Zoom. The senator has been participating in the legislative session remotely since earlier this month.

“I can understand your desire to speak to him and hear it directly from him, but I can’t let him do it under these circumstances,”  Mell told the committee.

An investigation by Legislative Auditor Angus Maciver concluded that Ellsworth had divided the $170,100 in government work into two contracts to avoid a required public bidding process for work in excess of $100,000. The contractor was a long-time business acquaintance of Ellsworth’s, but the senator hadn’t disclosed the relationship, or that Eggleston was being paid to do work he hadn’t done before. The contracts, already signed by the senator and contractor when submitted for state approval, were to be paid out before any work was done.

Mell argued that Eggleston, not Ellsworth, wrote the contracts, meaning that the senator couldn’t have intentionally divided up the work to avoid bidding laws, an alleged misdemeanor abuse of power currently under investigation by the state Department of Justice. The attorney said that Maciver dismissed details that would have cleared Ellsworth of wrongdoing. The former president was in the middle of a Senate power struggle with current Senate President Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, who reported the contract issue to Maciver. 

Maciver, Mell said, was under political pressure not only from the current power struggle, but also because Ellsworth chaired a committee that last June voted to extend Maciver’s contract for just one year because of issues raised by audited state department heads. Specifically, the department heads wanted attorneys present when being interviewed by the legislative auditor.  

Duerk said evidence pointed to Ellsworth awarding Eggleston a contract other legislators considered unnecessary. Ellsworth in 2024 had chaired a select committee that drafted 27 laws to limit the autonomy of Montana courts. Last year during committee hearings, Ellsworth had floated the idea of hiring someone to track the committee’s bills, but committee members declined. 

After the committee disbanded in mid-December, Ellsworth circled back and awarded government work to Eggleston, who had just registered with the state as a business with skills matching the custom reporting to be done. When the senator spoke to the Department of Administration about getting the contract approved, he allegedly told Director Misty Ann Giles that the select committee had approved the hire. That’s what Giles testified to Friday. 

Duerk said that the plan was to hire Eggleston all along, though Ellsworth never identified him by name to the committee, suggesting that someone would have to be found to do the work. 

Eggleston and Ellworth have a 20-year relationship. The two had been identified in a federal Trade Commission investigation into magazine sales in which an Ellsworth company had been accused of signing people up for magazine subscriptions they hadn’t agreed to. The case settled in 2009 and Ellsworth paid a $600,000 fine. 

BOWEN GREENWOOD

Montana’s Supreme Court Clerk, Republican Bowen Greenwood, was challenged in his 2024 reelection bid by Ellsworth. Months after the June primary, Ellsworth suggested that Greenwood hire Eggleston as a communications director. He was called as a witness Friday by Duerk.

The senator, Greenwood said, stated that the clerk’s office needed to be a conservative pulpit to criticize the judiciary, via press releases and letters to the editor in newspapers around the state. The idea was a nonstarter for Greenwood, who said he once crafted an opinion column before thinking better of it. 

“The fact of the matter is, no one particularly cares about my opinion,” Greenwood testified. “I’m a court clerk. I file paperwork. There’s no great interest in ‘what does Bowen Greenwood think about the doings of the Legislature or the Montana Supreme Court?’ And so, it seemed foolish to be throwing my opinion out there to newspapers, only for them to laugh and say, ‘who?’”

Nonetheless, Greenwood conversed with Eggleston, but he said he found the applicant’s resume to be void of experience.

That lack of experience was a recurring theme in Duerk’s examples of Ellsworth considering Eggleston for work that the senator’s business associate hadn’t previously done.

At one point, Duerk cited Eggleston’s state registration of Agile Analytics as a business, which didn’t initially include any mention of the work described in the “data gathering and analysis prep” contract awarded in December. 

ANGUS MACIVER

The legislative auditor made the initial investigation of the Ellsworth contract matter at the request of current Senate President Regier and Majority Aide Rhonda Knudsen, a former Republican state legislator and mother of Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen. He was called by Duerk on Friday.

Maciver concluded, based on interviews with legislative staff and the Department of Administration, that Ellsworth should have disclosed his past relationship with Eggleston under state public disclosure laws. Maciver also concluded that Ellsworth split the $170,100 in work awarded to Eggleston into the two contracts to avoid public bidding requirements, a point Ellsworth disputes.

As Maciver testified March 14, Ellsworth’s attorney, Mell, questioned whether the legislative auditor could have acted independently. Regier and Ellsworth are on opposite ends of a Senate power struggle stemming from committee assignments affecting Ellsworth and other lawmakers who say they were being punished by leadership. At times, Regier has lost control of the chamber because despite having 32 Republicans in the 50-member Senate, he hasn’t been able to muster a simple majority of 26 Republican votes on some key issues.

Mell argued that Maciver should have referred the conflict-of-interest issue to the Commissioner of Political Practices. 

Earlier, in a tort claim against Maciver, Ellsworth argued that the legislative auditor was motivated to issue findings against Ellsworth because the senator was chairman of a committee that in June 2024 renewed Maciver’s employment contract for just one year. Ellsworth has claimed the legislative auditor’s findings are incorrect and defamatory. The senator seeks $5 million in compensation from the state.

“I think it would be foolish for me to say that this wasn’t an awkward situation and one that I would have preferred not to be involved in, because that’s certainly true,” Maciver said. “However, under the hotline statute, this is a requirement for the legislative auditor. It’s an official duty. It’s not something that’s negotiable.”

Earlier in his testimony, Maciver told special counsel Duerk concerning whether there was political pressure directing the investigation that “there was nothing I remember, where people made demands and certainly if anybody at any time would have made a demand that we conclude on any of our work in any way, shape or form, I would have remembered that, because I would have told them that was inappropriate.” 

MISTY ANN GILES

The director of the state Department of Administration and her staff played a critical role in “perfecting” the contracts with Eggleston. Giles in testimony Friday characterized the work of procurement experts as making the best of a bad situation. The contracts were presented to DOA already signed, meaning Ellsworth had already locked the state into an agreement with Eggleston, Giles said. The Department of Administration received the contracts shortly after Christmas. The money to pay for work was going to expire in less than a week.

Giles said DOA employees contacted Eggleston, recognizing the contracts were signed but needed to be retooled to comply with state law, which the administration did by drafting a single, “sole source” contract, meaning the work didn’t have to be put out to bid.

Giles testified that she didn’t like the exceptions in contracting rules that allowed officials to issue contracts without putting work out to bid, but the exceptions, infrequently used, were there.

“We don’t love them as a matter of principle at the Department of Administration. It does happen,” Giles said. “If you’re familiar with the Montana Procurement Act, the total backbone of it is about competition and fairness, and trying to push things out, and ensuring that you do things in a more timely fashion to get all of the different bids and to see what’s on the market. That being said, we do approve them.”

Giles, when questioned by Duerk, said that the disclosure of conflicts of interest was the responsibility of the government official awarding a contract. How to disclose isn’t clearly written in procurement law, but disclosure of conflicts is at the core of contracting. 

“The reason states and localities in the federal government really have procurement laws is due to the issue of conflict of interest. And you know, conflict of interest can be anything that you know as a fiduciary relationship, or it could be a personal relationship. It could be that your mother owns a catering company,” Giles said. “It doesn’t necessarily bar you from that act. It’s more just best practice in my 20 years of doing government contracting to disclose that, because when you’re talking about taxpayer funds and you’re in a position of public trust and integrity, what you really just want to make sure is you’re not getting the, at least, even the appearance that you’re putting the thumb on the scale for someone that you may or may not know. No matter the relationship, it’s just, it’s just best practice.”

This story originally appeared in the Montana Free Press, which can be found online at montanafreepress.org.