Ex-ODU president implicated in Hamilton's hiring

RICHMOND

A retired Old Dominion University dean Tuesday implicated former ODU President Roseann Runte in putting a powerful state lawmaker on the university's payroll.

Then-Del. Phil Hamilton negotiated the job with a new teacher training center at ODU while helping secure funding for the center in the General Assembly.

He is now on trial on federal bribery and extortion charges.

William Graves, who was ODU's dean of education at the time, testified Tuesday about an August 2006 meeting that he attended in Runte's office with Runte, Hamilton and David Blackburn, an administrator who worked for Graves.

At that meeting, Graves testified, Hamilton promised to support funding for the new center in the legislature.

At one point Hamilton stepped out of the room, Graves said, and Runte gave him an order.

"She looked at me and Mr. Blackburn and said, 'That man wants a job,' " Graves said. " 'Make him director or something.' "

Asked his reaction, Graves said, "I think I nodded and said, 'Yes, ma'am.' "

Graves' testimony contradicts repeated denials from Runte that she knew anything about Hamilton's $40,000-a-year job.

Runte is now president of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Attorneys in the case went to Ottawa last week and took a videotaped deposition from her, which will be shown to the jury later in the trial. Hamilton's attorney has indicated that she was expected to rebut government witnesses' testimony.

George Kostel, a Washington lawyer representing Runte, said in an email Tuesday that "Dr. Runte has cooperated fully with the multiple investigations of this matter. She stands by her deposition testimony."

Graves and Blackburn both received immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony.

They both testified Tuesday that they were not completely truthful when they were questioned by a House of Delegates ethics panel about the Hamilton matter in 2009. The ethics inquiry was halted when Hamilton resigned his seat after losing his re-election bid.

"I minimized my role in the hiring of Phil Hamilton to protect myself," Graves testified. "All along I felt like this wasn't the right thing to do."

Hamilton, a Newport News Republican who wielded significant clout in shaping the state budget, has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, maintaining that he never made his support for funding of the ODU center conditional on his getting a job there.

But Graves testified that there was never any doubt that Hamilton would get the job. If he had not secured the funding, Graves said, he would not have been hired.

Graves said under questioning that he never expressed his reservations about Hamilton's hiring to Runte. Asked why not, he said, "I knew it would do no good."

He had offered Runte recommendations on other matters in the past, he said, but "it was words in the wind. It made no difference.... She knew when she told me to do things, I did it. Feedback wasn't necessary."

Blackburn testified that he put Hamilton on the payroll on Graves' orders. Blackburn was removed from his position after the lawmaker's relationship with ODU became public in 2009. Graves retired at the end of that academic year.

Blackburn also admitted lying repeatedly to FBI agents, internal ODU auditors and a federal grand jury about the affair, minimizing his involvement and omitting facts that would incriminate him.

The other major witness on the trial's second day was current ODU President John Broderick, who was a vice president when Hamilton was hired.

Broderick said he attended a meeting with Runte and Hamilton in December 2006 in which they discussed Hamilton's efforts to secure funding for the teacher center. But he said there was no discussion of a job for Hamilton, and that he didn't know the lawmaker was on the payroll until The Virginian-Pilot began inquiring about it two years later.

In response to open-records requests from The Pilot and the Daily Press of Newport News, Broderick ordered the release of hundreds of pages of emails in August 2009 that made it clear Hamilton was negotiating a job at the same time he was shepherding the center's funding through the legislature.

In a conference phone call just before the release of those emails, Broderick said, Hamilton suggested that messages he had sent to Runte could legally be withheld from release because they could be considered presidential working papers. Broderick rejected the suggestion.

In one of the released emails, sent Dec. 21, 2006, Hamilton reminded Runte that "when we talked about the Center last August, I expressed an interest in being associated with the initiative from a professional perspective."

Simultaneously with the release of the emails, Broderick ordered Hamilton's employment contract terminated because of "the impropriety of how the position was obtained," Broderick testified. "There was no search process."

By then, Hamilton had been paid $87,271 by the university. Bill Sizemore, (804) 697-1560, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com