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One week to go before the election, and the Salt Lake County Republican Party charges one Democratic candidate has broken the law.
This time, the head of the Salt Lake County Republican Party claims Democratic state representative candidate Lisa Johnson is in violation of state law because she's failed to register as a lobbyist.
About an hour after he notified the media, Salt Lake County Republican chair James Evans marched down to the Lieutenant Governor's Office to file a complaint against Democrat Lisa Johnson.
"Lisa Johnson has run on a theme of ethics reform. However, she is not following the current ethics laws," Evans said.
Johnson is running against Republican Greg Hughes, who not long ago was caught up in his own ethics investigation, but was cleared of the charges.
This complaint boils down to this: Should Johnson have registered as a lobbyist when she worked for the education policy group Utahns for Public Schools? Her response is "no" because she's not a lobbyist.
"As you know, this is the first time I've ever seen it, and I'm just kind of glancing over it. My initial reaction is I didn't register as a lobbyist because I wasn't hired to lobby," Johnson said.
Johnson says the education policy group had hired others to do that. She was hired as the communications director and then, later, promoted to executive director.
Instead, she questions why this complaint was filed just eight days before the election. "Things come out eight days before an election because people want to do things to mess up elections. I think it's a stunt, but it's not going to change what I'm doing," she said.
Evans counters by saying it's no stunt, it's an effort to expose Democrats and whether they're serious about ethics reform.
"It has to do with the Democrats who've been campaigning on a theme of ethics, and we demonstrated time and time again their hypocrisy," Evans said.
We contacted Rep. Greg Hughes to get his take on the matter, but he didn't want to comment on the complaint that was filed Monday.
That complaint will now be looked into by the Attorney General's Office to determine whether there's any merit to the allegations.
E-mail: lprichard@ksl.com
