The ethics noose keeps tightening around Gov. Deal's neck. Is anybody listening?

Gov. Nathan Deal's ethics problems . . . just keep on giving fodder for Jason Carter's campaign to unseat the governor.  For the background, see ShrinkRap posts on July 18, 19, and 25.

The latest installment concerns the now infamous "memo," written by Holly LaBerge, the Deal team's hand-picked replacement to head the ethics commission and make the case against the governor go away.    The memo was written by LaBerge on the day she herself felt pressured and threatened by the governor's aides to settle the case against the governor without a public hearing.    Then she put it away in a drawer as insurance to cover herself in the future, apparently.

Later, she turned it over to the Attorney General, but secretly kept a copy herself.   Neither LaBerge nor the AG included the memo in documents requested in the whistleblower trial of LaBerge's predecessor, Casey Kahlman, who won her case anyway and was awarded $1 million.

When the existence of the memo came to light a couple of months ago, Kahlman asked the court to sanction LaBerge and the AG's office for their failure to turn over the memo to her attorneys in their discovery process to prepare her case.    Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville heard the case last week, and this week announced his verdict.

LaBerge and the AG's office were each fined $10,000.    Judge Glanville said that Kahlman was entitled to have had the memo, as evidence that showed Deal's top aides repeatedly contacted her in the days prior to the commission's ruling on the Deal ethics case.

He also had harsh words for LaBerge herself, saying that she "has repeatedly proven herself to be dishonest and nontransparent."

Two questions:

1.   How can LaBerge remain in the job as executive director of the ethics commission after such an indictment of her integrity by a Superior Court judge?   Of course it will be up to the commission board itself to make that decision.

2.  How can all of this cumulative evidence of such abuse of power by Gov. Deal's staff not taint him?    It just doesn't seem to be gaining any traction with the public, even though the AJC is actively reporting it and Carter's campaign is using it.   Why isn't it killing Deal politically?   His staff's only power is his power.   So how is he not then responsible?   

Ralph