Fair warning: the following article is sure to aggravate the soul of the idealistic citizen. It offers a detailed primer on the sickness of state government, a system in which the powerful often take care of the powerful while jumping at opportunities to take action against those without perceived political power. For the many good-hearted readers of this publication, hang on, because it’s going to be revelatory.
Watch state government long enough, and one observes many frustrating inconsistencies. A politician who does one thing on Monday does the exact opposite by Friday, defending the inconsistency with a gaslighting pomposity that shocks and offends—until it doesn’t; because it’s just how politics works in the Oklahoma City swamp world.
That politician, in explaining the inconsistency, will likely grab onto the thinnest of threads to explain why the situations aren’t analogous.
But once in a while, a set of circumstances comes down the track so stunningly analogous that even the most naive observer has to stop calling it coincidence and accept reality.
One such example took place a few days ago.
It offered a quintessential illustration of how the politician who, in this writer’s view, was perhaps the most political of Oklahoma’s 21st century statewide officeholders, carried out a four-year term of self-promotion that stunned the observant mind. Yet for all of his righteous pomposity, one thing was consistent: when it came to holding the truly powerful to account, he was all talk and no bite, somehow finding a way to give the connected an out while saving his pointless, self-promotional grandstanding for those who were not so privileged.
Such was the case when Oklahoma’s secretary of state, unexpectedly deprived of delicious McDonald’s food, was forced to content himself with free admission to the Edmond Police Department’s latest mix-up with what appeared, at least from the subsequent open records footage, sans audio, to be an irate local gopnik.
Given the seriousness of the circumstances, Ben Lepak may not have fully appreciated the uniqueness of his front-row seat to the exchange. But he didn’t have long to let it sink in. Oklahoma’s political attorney general, Gentner Drummond, full-on in pursuit of a Republican gubernatorial nomination, had his communications team of not one, not two but three taxpayer-funded employees dashing off his condemnation of Lepak, the state official whose most important responsibilities include issuing LLC certificates and enrolling the Legislature’s latest tyrannical edicts into the state register.
For Drummond, Lepak’s misdemeanor arrest for alleged public intoxication by the Edmond Police Department offered yet another chance to deliver a patented Drummond knee swipe at his foremost foe, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt. Drummond bashed the governor for appointing Lepak to the job, specifically pointing to Lepak’s previous intoxication incident as disqualifying.
As Drummond’s three-person communications team stated:
“After reviewing footage from law enforcement body cameras, it is clear that Secretary of State Ben Lepak was thoroughly inebriated and very likely lied to law enforcement about how much he had to drink and how he and his car both arrived at the same place without him driving it. This conduct is thoroughly unbecoming of a such a high ranking state official, and I am demanding that Gov. Stitt fire him immediately.
Given the fact that Mr. Lepak had been arrested just a few years ago after being found unconscious in a running vehicle, Gov. Stitt should have known better than to elevate him to such a senior leadership position. Gov. Stitt has made countless errors in judgment like this during his tenure in office, including most recently when he intervened to help a campaign donor avoid further jail time. He cannot undo those past mistakes, but he can help our state avoid further embarrassment by firing Mr. Lepak immediately.”
Drummond’s press release, sent out just four days after the incident, provides a quintessential example of how thoroughly he has politicized the attorney general’s office.
It’s a longstanding tenet of the justice system: innocent until proven guilty. In days past, a serious-minded prosecutorial official handling a case would simply allow a court filing to speak for itself, avoiding the grandstanding that has become all too common in today’s social-media-driven world.
And if the case wasn’t on that official’s desk—as it isn’t here—the proper course was to give the responsible prosecutors the needed room for system to work sans politicization in the court of public opinion. They should be able to make a decision without worrying about the politicized chief prosecutor’s interference and public peacocking, potentially biasing a prospective jury.
Not anymore. The justice system under Drummond has degenerated into a social-media driven spectacle, peacocking a new set a feathers for every changing news cycle, especially when there’s a chance to take a swipe at a perceived political enemy: Stitt.
But commentary on Drummond’s many politicizations of the justice system is, unfortunately, simply par for the course by now. What makes this particular abuse so spectacular is the eye-popping contrast with Drummond’s response to an almost identical situation: the fall of 2022, alcohol-related arrest, by—you guessed it—the Edmond Police Department, of the powerfully connected House Appropriations vice chairman, Ryan Martinez.
Martinez, found in the parking lot of The Patriarch, an Edmond bar, after reportedly being refused service, also downplayed his level of intoxication—just as Drummond now claims Lepak did.
Martinez provided the body cameras with the quintessential example of how the political class believes it is above the law: He told Edmond police that he didn’t think they could arrest him because of his legislative privilege.
The Legislature was engaged in one of its costly, seemingly never-ending special sessions at the time, an abuse that became a hallmark of the McCall/Treat era. Martinez reportedly suggested officers that the special session may have given him protection from detention, even suggesting that they call Stitt himself to confirm it. The irony was hard to miss: Martinez had not long before labeled Stitt a “racist.”
It was a sensational claim to make, but Edmond police never flinched. They simply did their job. Martinez was charged with a felony: actual physical control of a vehicle while intoxicated. It was a much more serious charge than the public intoxication charge now facing Lepak.
Team McCall wasn’t about to let one of its most connected lieutenants be sidelined. Throughout the ensuing legislative session, Martinez continued to take on a prominent role in representing the McCall team, receiving reappointment as vice chair of Appropriations and remaining in the presiding officer rotation at the head of the House.
In March 2023, it was Martinez who infamously defended the House’s refusal to let state Rep. Tom Gann ask questions about the massive corporate welfare giveaway, and frankly, a special law, to the German Volkswagen corporation. Martinez indicated that because the issue had been discussed in the closed-door Republican caucus meeting, it was OK to proceed.
That Martinez was onstage, front and center, representing Team McCall and its failure to allow not just debate but even questions on this important matter spoke to the team’s arrogance regarding public perception and transparency. They clearly just stopped believing the public even cared about this concepts.
This set the stage for how, two years later, Team Hilbert would handle the subsequent corporate welfare giveaway for the United Arab Emirates-based company’s Inola aluminum smelter: proceeding quickly, with very little public input or even knowledge of the proposal before final passage.
During that same legislative session, the House officially censured state Rep. Dean Davis, someone who had also experienced an unfortunate late-night exchange with police. The hapless Davis, simply didn’t have the connections of Martinez.
By May 2023, House leaders McCall and Wallace were issuing their perfunctory, self-congratulatory, end-of-session budget press release. Amid the usual education funding platitudes—“the highest level of education funding in state history”—Martinez was highlighted by McCall, front and center, for his work on the document.
Then came the day of reckoning. House leadership had stood behind Martinez, keeping him influential throughout the 2023 session, even after he had exercised such bad judgment in trying to escape the consequences of his alleged actions. In August 2023, the walls started to close in as Martinez pleaded guilty to the felony charge.
The question then became: Since the Oklahoma Constitution prohibits felons from holding office, would Martinez need to resign?
Now the McCall/Echols team had a bit of a predicament on its hands. That organization infamously took care of its own, having notoriously stood by McCall’s close lieutenant, Terry O’Donnell, as he was first charged and then let off the hook by—you guessed it—Drummond, after O’Donnell had allegedly sponsored legislation that would benefit his relatives.
Would Drummond be willing to protect the political establishment once again?
Here’s where things got very tricky.
Allowing Martinez to remain in office turned on a narrow legal distinction: whether his guilty plea and deferred sentence amounted to the judicial declaration of guilt that would trigger constitutional suspension from office. In this writer’s view, treating that distinction as permission to remain in office required torturing and contorting the law into its most generous interpretation for a politically connected officeholder. Drummond’s office supplied that interpretation in an advisory letter, giving McCall what looked very much like political cover for keeping Martinez in his seat.
Note that this wasn’t an official opinion. Such an opinion would have gone onto the books, where Drummond could forever—and rightly—be judged for issuing a legal absurdity, not worth the paper it was printed on, for the presumed purpose of allowing a powerful politician to retain his seat.
Instead, it was an “advisory” letter in which the AG decided he could play the role of attorney for the McCall machine, giving McCall, the politician, a piece of paper to use in defense of the indefensible and quite the abuse of the taxpayers dollars that are funding that office.
One has to feel for the hapless deputy general counsel charged with putting his name on the letter. In an incredible footnote, he had to admit: “Despite my interpretation, I could see a court reaching a different conclusion.”
As an aside, always read the footnotes. That’s perhaps a subject for a future training course in our citizens’ academy on audit analysis, legal letters such as this, and how to tell when a political game is being played.
Former state Rep. Mike Reynolds was going to give the courts exactly that opportunity. Filing a pro se petition, he called the bluff of the McCall/Drummond machine. Martinez checked out of office to become a lobbyist and dark-money campaign fund manager for McCall.
Here, in a most ironic turn, he would advocate for legislation that would tie the hands of the Edmond City Council in the very community he had “represented.” When considering new development projects, the council would find it more difficult to take local residents’ views into account. It’s one of the most frightening pieces of legislation, one most readers have probably never heard of, but one with enormous implications for local public policy.
It’s not as though Team McCall couldn’t have seen this coming. During the 2018 campaign, Martinez’s rocket ride into the Team McCall leadership group faced a challenge. Specifically, his 2018 primary challenger made an issue of the fact that, in a 2014 alcohol-related incident, Martinez had struck another vehicle, been placed on probation, and been required to use an interlock device.
Defending Martinez in the press? That was McCall’s foremost right-hand man, Jon Echols, who boldly declared that the “attacks” on Martinez were “flat-out character assassinations” and further explained: “It makes it hard for me to recruit candidates when they’ve got to deal with these extreme personal attacks. ... It gives all of us a bad name.”
Beyond the implications of Echols vouching for Martinez before Martinez’s 2022 arrest, the reader begins to see behind the curtain. The revelatory fact is that Echols was recruiting the candidates who would comprise the century’s most institutionally minded, big-government legislators—a far cry from the earlier, first generation of Republican leaders. Why was Echols interring in Republican primaries? Is it too much to ask the machine to not feed the machine with their handpicked candidates and to simply trust the people, the voters of those districts to decide?
But it’s not just that. It goes back to Drummond, the very individual who was so quick, four days after an alleged incident involving Lepak, to call out Stitt for having the bad judgment to appoint him.
After a clear attempt to give Martinez the cover needed to continue holding his seat, Drummond most certainly didn’t similarly call out Echols for his role in vouching for Martinez to the voters of House District 39. Echols had interfered in a Republican primary, only for those voters, notwithstanding Echols assurances, to later suffer great embarrassment when body-camera footage emerged of their intoxicated representative arrogantly seeming to suggest that police might not be able to detain him because of his status as a member of the Legislature.
Fast forward to 2024, and enter Drummond, on the scene of a garish, self-indulgent Capitol swamp event, the type of thing that would perhaps make the ancient Romans blush. It was a who’s who of the Capitol swamp scene: a $23,750 dinner financed by lobbyist groups ranging from AIPAC to OG&E to ONG to CAMP, the state’s premier consulting firm, and even a state agency, hilariously and officially denoted in state ethics reports as the “Grand River ‘Damn’ Authority.” Your eastern Oklahoma utility rates at work for you.
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