As reported on this blog previously, Coos County Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean claimed during an interview with Register Guard reporter, Winston Ross, his recent bankruptcy was due in part to using personal savings to defend against a recall effort. The claim raised the specter of possible campaign finance law abuse as he did not claim any personal contributions or expenses with OreSTAR.

Stufflebean repeated the claim in a later interview with the LA Times about recall elections around the country. Several Coos County citizens have reported the inconsistencies with the Oregon Secretary of State and this week, Eldon Rollins asked Stufflebean during a BOC meeting why his expenses were not properly reported. Caught in a web of his own making Stufflebean tried to hide behind a claim of personal privacy and followed up with Rollins after the meeting via email-

From: kstufflebean@CO.COOS.OR.US
To: Rollins
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 13:52:50 -0700
Subject: Personal Information

Eldon:
Just to clarify your question that would be a fact that all reportable information was placed on ORESTAR per campaign finance laws.
If you have further questions regarding my personal stuff, then I would encourage you to email or stop by my office or call.

Kevin Stufflebean

From: Rollins
To: kstufflebean@CO.COOS.OR.US
Kevin, just to clarify even more:
Your campaign expenses and how you met them are not personal stuff. They are public campaign finance reporting stuff.
Furthermore, your newspaper interviews are not private stuff, they are public because you made them public.
If you are quoted in the newspapers as saying that one of the reasons you had to declare bankruptcy was because of all the money of your own you had to spend on the recall, then a prudent individual would assume you spent a fair amount of your own money on it.
Sincerely,
Eldon Rollins

So “all reportable information” was provided to OreSTAR after all, meaning Stufflebean’s statements to two separate reporters from two respected newspapers separated by a period of weeks were untrue, a falsehood, something akin to ‘a lie’. Stufflebean, when caught in inconsistencies famously blames the press for misquoting him but The Register Guard and The LA Times are not as easily impeached as the local press.

Naturally, there is no reason to believe Stufflebean is ‘accurate’ now if he was inaccurate before, in fact there is every motivation to question every statement that comes from him, unfortunately The World does not do their job and will not report for the public just how liberal with the truth some of our elected officials are.