State employees appear in ad for McDonnell

RICHMOND

Days after the state's attorney general said his office has not been aiding gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, the Republican's campaign released a TV commercial featuring three staff members praising their former boss.

The ad includes appearances from two female deputy attorneys general and a secretary on the state payroll. It is intended to push back against attacks by Democrat Creigh Deeds, who has accused McDonnell of opposing women who work outside the home.

They aren't the only Attorney General's Office employees who have been linked to McDonnell's campaign through e-mails and attendance at political events.

An expert said the use of state employees in political advertising is virtually unheard of in Virginia political history, though there have been controversies in the past about overlap between government operations and political activities.

For example, Republicans this past summer griped that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's role as the top political partisan with the Democratic National Committee was interfering with his primary job as the state's chief executive.

A long-standing unwritten policy in Virginia prohibits government workers from engaging in political work while on taxpayers' time. But that rule isn't always followed, according to University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato.

It's also common to see people who work on political campaigns end up in the state office of the candidate if he or she is elected. And staffers in a government office sometimes leave to work for the political campaign of a former boss.

Sabato noted that similar flare-ups over whether political work was occurring on taxpayers' time occurred during the tenures of governors John Dalton, a Republican, and Chuck Robb, a Democrat.

In an interview earlier this week, Attorney General Bill Mims said no government help has been given to the McDonnell campaign. Any state employee who does political work is required to be off the clock and may not use office materials, he added.

Mims said he and other senior staffers take leave when they attend political functions during normal work hours, such as a recent Fairfax County debate.

The new commercial featuring office staff members was shot on a workday, but officials said participants took personal time to attend the taping.

The interview with Mims was part of a Virginian-Pilot inquiry into possible coordination between state government agencies and the campaigns of all six candidates for statewide office this year. In addition to the Attorney General's Office, The Pilot filed open-records requests with Kaine's office; Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling's office; Finance Secretary Ric Brown's office, which Democrat Jody Wagner once ran; and the legislative offices of state Sen. Deeds, Republican state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli and Democratic state Del. Steve Shannon.

This year, Bolling faces a re-election challenge from Wagner. Cuccinelli and Shannon are the candidates for attorney general.

The records requests sought e-mails, phone records and other correspondence between those agencies and the campaigns. The offices of Kaine and Brown responded that they had no such public records. A Cuccinelli aide said no communications had occurred between the legislative office and the campaign.

Earlier this year, Kaine's office rejected reporters' requests for his travel records before providing some details of his whereabouts since being named DNC chairman in January.

Kaine has campaigned on behalf of Deeds, Wagner and Shannon, and the DNC, under his leadership, has pledged money to their campaigns.

Most of the records provided by Bolling, Deeds and Shannon are e-mails. Several of those shared by Bolling and Shannon are messages addressed to both government and campaign workers.

By far, Deeds turned over the largest number of documents, the majority of which were e-mails apparently intended for his campaign that were instead sent to his legislative office, then forwarded to the campaign.

Records provided by the Attorney General's Office likewise show some e-mail traffic between the agency's staff and members of McDonnell's campaign team. For instance, the office provided copies of an internal daily news-clip service to members of McDonnell's press team.

In September, the office also waded into a dispute over the veracity of an ad Deeds aired in southwest Virginia accusing McDonnell of supporting higher utility rates as attorney general. On the same day Deeds launched the ad, the Attorney General's Office issued a press release stating that the attorney general does not approve rate increases.

Mims said the press release wasn't a defense of McDonnell but rather "a defense of the truth. Nothing more, nothing less."

Julian Walker, (804) 697-1564, julian.walker@pilotonline.com