Bob Mercer writing in today's Watertown Public Opinion:
What went around, later came around at Sutton hearing
Bob Mercer
February 3, 2007
Watertown Public Opinion
PIERRE -- The lawyers for the sexual misconduct hearing against state Sen. Dan Sutton didn't get to pick a jury. Because the proceeding was legislative rather than judicial, it was at its heart political.
What a tangled web of politics it was, stretching back years, connecting in ways the participants perhaps understood, but lost for many outsiders.
The lawyers for and against Sutton, D-Flandreau, presented their evidence to a panel of nine senators who were appointed by the Republican and Democratic leadership of the South Dakota Senate.
Among those on the panel, officially known as the Select Committee on Discipline and Expulsion, was Sen. Gene Abdallah, R-Sioux Falls.
He knows first-hand what political machinations can do to a person's career.
He saw his son Scott Abdallah forced to withdraw from the front-runner's spot for a prestigious federal appointment as U.S. attorney for South Dakota.
No one has ever suggested Gene Abdallah, a former head of the South Dakota Highway Patrol and a former U.S. marshal, can't cut through conflicting information to make up his own mind on the facts of a situation.
But having Sen. Abdallah and Jim McMahon in key roles at the hearing was an odd convergence.
McMahon was selected as the U.S. attorney for South Dakota when Scott Abdallah withdrew. McMahon, now in private practice again, was hired in November by the Legislature's Executive Board to serve as its special counsel to investigate the allegation against Sutton.
McMahon essentially served as the Senate's prosecutor against Sutton.
Likewise, had this been in a courtroom, it would have been unusual to have on the jury Senate Democratic minority leader Scott Heidepriem of Sioux Falls. He was vice chairman of the Sutton committee. A very successful attorney in private practice, Heidepriem is a law partner of Scott Abdallah.
Another partner in the Heidepriem-Abdallah law firm is Russ Janklow, the son of former Gov. Bill Janklow. The elder Janklow served on McMahon's side as the personal attorney at the Senate hearing for Sutton's accuser, 19-year-old Austin Wiese of Flandreau.
This web gets much more tangled.
Bill Janklow was the No. 1 supporter in South Dakota for McMahon's appointment as U.S. attorney. Still, it's doubly intriguing that Janklow would help the Wiese family.
The accuser's father, Dennis Wiese, is a former president of South Dakota Farmers Union. Bill Janklow truly, strongly dislikes Dennis Wiese for things Janklow says were done against him politically by Wiese in the past.
Janklow made clear at the hearing that he believed Austin Wiese's story.
On the flip side, Sutton was one of a handful of Democratic legislators to whom Janklow in his last term as governor repeatedly reached out, through his senior staff, for help on key votes, when too many of Janklow's fellow Republicans were digging in their heels against one of his ideas.
Two of the biggest legislative fights in 2000, the sale of the state cement plant and the tobacco- settlement plan, come to mind as examples when Sutton backed Janklow while most Democratic lawmakers didn't.
Janklow, Sutton and the Wieses all grew up in the same hometown of Flandreau. Janklow was leaving there, after stopping to visit his mother, on the Saturday afternoon three summers ago when he drove through a stop sign.
The crash instantly killed motorcyclist Randy Scott, forced Janklow's resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives and sent him to jail for 100 days.
The person who replaced Janklow in the U.S. House was Democrat Stephanie Herseth, whom Janklow had beaten in the 2002 election. Prior to running for the House, Rep. Herseth served as executive director for the South Dakota Farmers Union Foundation, where she worked closely with SDFU's then-president Dennis Wiese.
When Janklow drove from Brandon to Pierre for the Sutton hearing, he had just received his driver license again. Janklow also has just recently resumed practicing law. One of the lawyers who served on the disciplinary review committee that temporarily took away Janklow's law license was Nancy Turbak.
Turbak, D-Watertown, is now a state senator. She served on the Sutton hearing committee, too. She was recruited by Heidepriem to run for the Legislature long before the Sutton matter spilled into public light. She ran because Sen. Lee Schoenbeck, R Watertown, chose to not seek reelection.
It was Dennis Wiese who went to Schoenbeck in October demanding action from the Senate against Sutton, because Attorney General Larry Long hadn't taken criminal action.
Schoenbeck then wrote the infamous letter to Sutton in mid- October, threatening Sutton with an investigation and possible expulsion or impeachment if he didn't resign.
This gets even more tangled.
Schoenbeck is a brother-in-law of the Catholic priest in Flandreau, Father Richard Fox. The Suttons and Wieses belong to the Catholic parish in Flandreau.
Sutton had asked Austin Wiese last February to meet with Father Fox about Wiese's allegations Sutton sexually touched Wiese.
That meeting never took place.
Sutton was alerted that a criminal case was being built against him when he was asked to meet with a DCI agent, the day after Wiese called him to make the allegations. The DCI was recording that telephone conversation.
The priest, after learning about the allegations, immediately removed Sutton from teaching the parish's confirmation class for teen-agers.
Schoenbeck said he didn't learn about the criminal investigation against Sutton in about May. Schoenbeck, the Senate president pro tempore, took no action and didn't inform the Legislature's Executive Board until Wiese contacted him a month before the Nov. 7 election.
When Sutton wouldn't quit, Schoenbeck and other legislative leaders proceeded against him. Among the people with whom Schoenbeck conferred was Jeremiah Murphy, the longest serving lobbyist at the Legislature, and throughout the course of his decades at the Capitol, perhaps the most powerful.
Murphy handles sexual-abuse legal cases for the Sioux Falls Catholic diocese. McMahon, while not a partner officially, shares the same office suite and administrative staff with Murphy. That allows them to refer cases to one another when there is a possible conflict.
Schoenbeck said he wrote the letter to Sutton because suddenly felt pressured politically by Wiese because of a sex scandal unfolding in Congress.
But Schoenbeck, who made no secret of his ambition to run for governor in 2010, was on the rocks politically in October, as Republicans faced the increasing possibility of losing their majority in the state Senate.
Schoenbeck and other antiabortion conservatives had engineered a purge in the June primaries of Republican senators who voted against the 2006 abortion ban.
The strategy ousted Republican incumbents such as Duane Sutton of Aberdeen, Stan Adelstein of Rapid City and Clarence Kooistra of Garretson. The effort also defeated other Republican primary candidates who were not strongly against legalized abortion.
The lack of incumbents helped Democrats pick up five seats in November, including Turbak's victory over Schoenbeck's candidate to succeed him, Dennis Arnold of Watertown.
Republicans went from 25 to 20 senators, while Democrats rose from 10 to 15. The change in proportion meant Democrats also earned at least one more slot on the Sutton hearing committee.
The committee voted 6-3 a week ago to recommend the Senate censure Sutton rather than expel him. The six were four Democrats: Heidepriem, Turbak, Sen. Gary Hanson of Sisseton and Sen. Ben Nesselhuf of Vermillion.
The two Republicans were Abdallah and Sen. Ed Olson of Mitchell, who led the push for the Sutton investigation in his role as the Executive Board chairman.
The full Senate voted against expulsion 20-14. The 20 were all 14 present Democrats (Sutton left the floor during the voting) and six Re
It's impossible to predict what might have happened in the Sutton matter if the Republican abortion purge hadn't taken place last June, and if Heidepriem and Sandy Jerstad of Sioux Falls hadn't taken out two more Republican incumbents in the Nov. 7 elections.
But it's clear the dynamics would have been different and Sutton would have faced a politically more hostile Senate.
Sutton's temporary resignation after the election avoided the hearing set for the Nov. 28 special session, when the Senate membership was still 25 Republicans and 10 Democrats. Expulsion required 24 votes.
The connections and motivations are many in the Sutton matter. We likely can never know how all the pieces came together. But what's now obvious is none of this was as simple as it first sounded.
McMahon handled a sketchy set of sometimes-conflicting evidence and witnesses professionally and skillfully, and perhaps as best someone could. The Senate hearing, if nothing else, showed why a criminal charge wasn't brought against the senator by the attorney general.
Questions will always remain, especially the most important one of all: What really happened in that motel room where Dennis Wiese let his son stay with their former family friend and political rival?
Nothing? Accidental touching? An unwanted sexual advance? The devious start of political blackmail?
The answer probably will take a death-bed confession. Until then, South Dakota can only speculate about who lied.
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