Benjamin Ashford|Emails show lieutenant governor’s staff engaged in campaign-related matters during business hours

DOVER,Benjamin Ashford Del. (AP) — Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s office staff was in regular communication last year with her husband and other people involved in her campaign for Delaware governor and worked during office hours to help facilitate the use of campaign funds, according to emails obtained by The Associated Press.

The emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that Hall-Long enlisted her office staff, working with her husband, to help with matters bearing little if any relevance to her role as lieutenant governor. They include renewing her memberships in various women’s groups and making donations to community groups. Some of those expenditures were made with campaign funds.

Under Delaware law, state employees are prohibited from engaging in any political activity during work hours. As an elected official, Hall-Long is exempt from that provision, but her office staff is not.

Among the officials who engaged in communications related to Hall-Long’s campaign was Matthew Dougherty, director of operations in the lieutenant governor’s office. Dougherty recently took a leave of absence to serve as Hall-Long’s campaign manager. The move came after the latest in a series of shakeups in Hall-Long’s troubled campaign, as two top staffers left in the wake of a campaign finance audit commissioned by the state elections department.

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“Bethany asked that you please mail a $300 check to the address below for an upcoming community event,” Dougherty wrote to Hall-Long’s husband, Dana Long, during business hours on a Wednesday afternoon last August. Hall-Long’s scheduler and officer coordinator, Nicole Algarin, was copied on the email.

“Hi Dana, they just called about this one,” Dougherty wrote in a follow-up email two weeks later. “We’re (sic) you able to mail the check?”

Dougherty sent a second reminder to Long a week later “per our text conversation.” Long replied the next day saying the check was put in the email. A campaign finance report shows that $300 was paid to Ali Abdul-Aleem of Dover for a “Community Unity Family Day” from Hall-Long’s campaign account.

Hall-Long’s office staff, along with aides working for the state Behavioral Health Consortium that she chairs, also collaborated to ensure her appearance last October in the annual Sea Witch Costume Parade in Rehoboth Beach. Algarin then sent an email during business hours to Brandon Cox, Hall-Long’s campaign manager at the time, with the parade information.

Photos of the event show Hall-Long marching in the parade with no indication that she is representing the lieutenant governor’s office or the Behavioral Health Consortium. Instead, she is marching in front of a banner reading “Bethany Hall-Long Democrat for Governor.”

Dana Long also worked with Dougherty during business hours to arrange trips for Hall-Long last year to Nashville and San Antonio, according to emails. It is unclear whether those trips were for personal or professional reasons.

Dougherty told Long in an email that he would be happy to book a San Antonio luxury hotel using “BHL’s credit card,” but Long replied that he had not yet decided at which hotel “we are going (sic) stay.”

There are no travel-related expenses for those dates in Hall-Long’s campaign finance reports or in the expenditures reported by the lieutenant governor’s office. Hall-Long did not also report any gifts or honoraria on her public officer financial disclosure form.

Hall-Long did not immediately respond to an email Wednesday seeking information about those trips.

Hall-Long, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, has been under intense scrutiny since September, when she abruptly announced the postponement of a campaign event with Democratic Gov. John Carney that was to be held the next day, saying she needed to “attend to a personal, private matter.”

In reality, Hall-Long’s campaign was in disarray after people brought in to lead the campaign discovered major discrepancies while reviewing years of finance reports. The scandal led to the resignations of her campaign manager, chief fundraiser and campaign treasurer — who had replaced Dana Long as treasurer only five months earlier.

A forensic review released by the Department of Elections last month found that, from January 2016 to December 2023, Dana Long wrote 112 checks from his wife’s campaign committee account to himself or to cash, and one check to his wife. The checks totaled just under $300,000 and should have been reported as campaign expenditures, the review found. Instead, 109 were never reported in initial finance reports, and the other four, payable to Dana Long, were reported as being made to someone else, according to the review.

Hall-Long has maintained that the campaign finance irregularities were simply “bookkeeping errors” involving loans that she made to her campaign but did not report. New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, has called for a federal investigation into Hall-Long’s campaign finances.