An Arkansas circuit court has been asked to review whether the state’s Ethics Commission appropriately applied the law in allowing Treasurer Dennis Milligan to retroactively alter finance reports.
Attorney and liberal blogger Matt Campbell said his ethics complaint against state Treasurer Dennis Milligan was for financial filings made before passage of a law allowing office holders to alter filing reports.
"The campaign finance reports my complaints was based on were filed in 2014, and that affirmative defense wasn't passed by the legislature until April of 2015, and it wasn't retroactive by its own terms," he said. Campbell said Milligan should be fined for several more violations.
Treasurer Milligan’s attorney Byron Freeland said he believes the issue is already resolved.
"They were not really ethical violations, they were just filing violations," said Freeland.
"He was fined $100 for each of those and he decided to go ahead and accept that because you can't go to circuit court or Supreme Court to litigate something like that when you're fighting about $400.”
The Arkansas Ethics Commission is still deliberating on a separate claim against Treasurer Milligan and Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, for campaigning for Mike Huckabee on a regularly scheduled work day.
