The following editorial appeared in the May 2013 print edition of Carolina Journal:

Now that Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby has closed his investigation of illegal activities by former Gov. Bev Perdue’s campaign, the unanswered question should not be, “What did Perdue know and when did she know it?” but “Why didn’t she try to deal with the crimes sooner?”

After all, five people associated with her 2008 campaign for governor — including Peter Reichard, her campaign finance chairman; Buzzy Stubbs, the former law partner of her late first husband; and Juleigh Sitton, whom Perdue chose to run her Western North Carolina office — are criminals as the result of actions they took to hide campaign flights and salaries worth tens of thousands of dollars while Perdue was ferried from one fundraising event to another. These were not low-level operatives who failed to file paperwork correctly. They were senior members of the campaign who were orchestrating and benefiting from an elaborate criminal conspiracy.

You’d think the governor would want to get to the bottom of the troubles, or at least find out what was going on. But no. As media reports of the investigation (including several in Carolina Journal) revealed the complexity of what the State Board of Elections called an “aircraft provider” program for the campaign, Perdue and her team acted as if they were learning of these events when they saw them in the press.

This lack of curiosity doesn’t add up. In the spring of 2009, members of her campaign staff (if not people inside the governor’s office) began scrambling to account for as many as 100 flights Perdue took in 2007 and 2008. State campaign law says any services provided to a campaign must be repaid in a timely manner — typically within a week. Some of Perdue’s flights took place more than two years before her campaign reported or paid for them.

Even so, the governor’s attitude throughout was: “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.”

CJ covered the scandals from the beginning, and our reports on a December 2007 Perdue flight involving Morganton businessman Mike Fulenwider and former magistrate Robert Lee Caldwell were the first media accounts of the scheme that led to Caldwell’s April 24 misdemeanor plea agreement. Fulenwider pleaded guilty in a separate money-hiding scheme.

What may have been lost in the coverage is how much Perdue gained from these freebies. Stubbs tried to hide flights worth $28,000. Fulenwider laundered $32,000 to supplement Sitton’s salary. The dozens of unreimbursed flights were worth thousands of dollars that the campaign received from donors who had given the legal maximum. By getting those flights for free from current donors, Perdue did not have to recruit new donors and convince them to contribute. These schemes allowed the campaign to get twice the bang for its buck, if not more.

With a criminal conspiracy of such complexity taking place under her nose, if Perdue really was this clueless, you have to wonder how much attention she paid to the serious matters of governance North Carolinians trusted her to confront.