BY NOAH LANARD excerpt: Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. There are holes in Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles’ personal story. Some have been relatively harmless fabrications. Ogles claimed to be a scholar of German, Japanese, and Russian and he has repeatedly described himself as an economist. In fact, Ogles took one only one community college course in Elementary Japanese (receiving a B) and one in economics (receiving a C). Soon after, he dropped out. But gaps in his narrative of past events might be more consequential. In particular, the stories Ogles told during his winning 2022 campaign about his personal and campaign finances. A recently released Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) report found substantial evidence that Ogles “omitted or misrepresented required information in his financial disclosure statements or FEC candidate committee reports” during the race that sent him to Washington—a potentially criminal violation of federal campaign finance law. (Ogles’ congressional office did not respond to requests for comment.) The report centers on a nonexistent $320,000 loan Ogles reported making while running in a competitive House primary in 2022. In late 2023, Phil Williams, the chief investigative reporter at NewsChannel 5 in Tennessee, reported that Ogles’ Congressional financial disclosure showed that he was unlikely to have had the assets required to have loaned his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, followed up with a complaint that asked OCE to investigate Ogles. It is illegal to falsely report information to the Federal Election Commission. Last year, George Santos pleaded guilty to submitting fake loan information to the FEC to inflate his campaign’s financial position. Candidates have an incentive to report fake loans to make their campaigns appear more financially healthy than they actually are. In February, OCE began its investigation and notified Ogles about it. A few months later, Ogles admitted that he had never loaned his campaign $320,000. Instead, he submitted amended Federal Election Commission reports and claimed to have “pledged” his campaign $320,000, while only loaning his campaign $20,000. From there, the problems grew. FBI agents seized Ogles’ phone in August as part of their own investigation into his campaign finance practices. (Ogles has said about the FBI investigation that he is “confident all involved will conclude that the reporting discrepancies were based on honest mistakes, and nothing more.”) OCE’s recently released report strongly suggests that investigators did not find the congressman’s current explanation convincing. In recommending that the ethics committee further investigate Ogles, it concluded that there was “substantial reason to believe” both that he “omitted or misrepresented required information in his financial disclosure statements” and that he “accepted excessive contributions reported as personal loans from the candidate.” OCE was not able to identify the source of the $20,000 loan Ogles now reports having made to his campaign, or whether it actually came from his personal funds. But it could be a family affair. In 2022, Ogles’ in-laws guaranteed a $700,000 line of credit for Ogles and his wife that the congressman initially failed to include on his congressional financial disclosure, according to Williams’ reporting and Ogles’ financial disclosures. (Ogles, his wife, and his in-laws, refused to cooperate with the OCE investigation; his in-laws did not respond to a request for comment.) If a $20,000 loan was paid using that line of credit the congressman may have violated federal campaign finance law by exceeding maximum contribution limits. While individuals can donate unlimited amounts to their campaign, other people—including spouses and relatives—cannot. Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel, and senior director for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, said that if a candidate receives a loan, it is considered a contribution from the guarantor under federal campaign finance law. It can get complicated, he said, based on the terms of the loan and whether any of it has been repaid: “But the bottom line is: For any money that the guarantor is responsible for, that amount is a contribution to that candidate.” Ogles has not addressed where he got the money for the loan. He stated on a revised congressional financial disclosure that the line of credit was taken out after he says the loan was made. If that is correct, it could mean than he followed campaign finance law by using his own funds for the loan—not money tied to his in-laws. Thomas Datwyler, Ogles’ treasurer, and Grant Henry, his 2022 campaign manager and current chief of staff, did talk to and share documents with investigators. Henry appears to have known little about the campaign’s finances. As he told OCE investigators, “I never knew the financial state of the campaign since the entirety of the time that I was working for it.” Instead, decisions about how to spend money were handled almost exclusively by the candidate. Datwyler painted a concerning picture. “I work with two dozen congressmen, five senators, he’s the only one that I don’t have access to his bank account,” he noted. Datwyler said that instead of allowing access to the campaign bank account to verify the existence of the $320,000 loan, Ogles sent him a document that Datwyler believed was a bank statement that included the loan. The treasurer told investigators that he later learned it was actually a spreadsheet. Nevertheless, Datwyler still serves as Ogles’ treasurer. As he explained, “He’s a sitting member of Congress, so, you know, you don’t want to lose them as clients, right,” Datwyler explained. ”So, you kind of just have to deal with certain things sometimes. But I would constantly request the bank statements.” Like Ogles, Datwyler has a colorful past. In January 2023, Santos informed the FEC that he was replacing his first campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, with Datwyler. (Marks has since pleaded guilty to filing fraudulent FEC reports on Santos’ behalf.) A strange saga followed from there. At first, in a confusing and ultimately misleading twist, Datwyler denied through his attorney to Mother Jones and other outlets that he was Santos’ treasurer. Santos then made someone named Andrew Olson his treasurer. Essentially nothing was known about Olson. A Daily Beast investigation later revealed that Olson and Datwyler were friends, and that Olson was effectively serving as a front. “I don’t know if that makes Datwyler the George Santos of treasurers, but it doesn’t make him a good person or honest in any way,” Saurav Ghosh the director of the federal campaign finance reform program at CLC said at the time. Datwyler’s former attorney has since told the FEC he was likely misled by his client. (Datwyler did not respond to a request for comment.) Datwyler only ended up getting the bank records in May via his lawyers after Ogles had admitted to the fake loan scheme, according to the OCE report. He speculated that Ogles might have made up the loan because it ”just looks better when you have more money.” Specifically, he said, it can “scare away the competition and buy the primary.” This isn’t the first time Ogles has run into money problems. In 2004, while the then-30-something Ogles was running a doughnut shop and restaurant called the Doughnut Deli, the Tennessee Department of Revenue filed a tax lien against the Ogles and his father-in-law. Nor is it the first time he’s seemed to tell tall tales about his business past. Williams also discovered a 2009 resume that includes many misrepresentations, according to Williams and Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler. The resume states he received a degree in international relations when he had actually majored in liberal studies. In his 2009 resume, Ogles wrote that he was currently working as Executive Vice President at E.Net Media & Consulting. Kessler found no trace of that company in Tennessee records. As part of his alleged work for E.Net, Ogles said his consulting work saved Merrill Lynch up to $45 million annually. The Post found no evidence to support that claim. A spokesperson for Bank of America, which acquired Merrill Lynch, told the paper that he worked as stockbroker for less than a year. (Ogles said in the 2001 profile in which he boasted about his alleged language skills that he was an aspiring screenwriter.) In May, Ogles requested a 90-day extension to file his personal financial disclosure in Congress. Ogles missed that deadline in August and still has not filed it. Any future financial disclosures could expose him to additional legal liability if they contain false information. Alternatively, if they are accurate, the information included could potentially provide investigators with additional evidence that Ogles misled the public about his campaign finances while running for Congress. Santos confronted the same dilemma before being expelled from Congress. Like Ogles, he requested an extension to file his financial disclosure form. Like with Ogles, he went on to blow through the deadline. |
