Party leader resigns amid investigation into unapproved expenditures

by Jesse Mullen, Deer Lodge

According to emails released by members of the Montana Democratic Party Executive Board, the board was actively investigating former state party Chair Shannon O’Brien for financial wrongdoing when she resigned.

In other words, she’s accused of giving money donated to the Democratic Party to a buddy.

The emails showed board members discussing a severance document Shannon created with the help of the person she was about to give more than $30,000 worth of party money to, former Deputy Director Justin Ailport.

Ailport had applied to be the permanent Executive Director of Montana Democrats but was passed over for the job by Emily Marburger, an up-and-coming organizer from Pennsylvania who had flipped some seats and was ambitiously hoping to create similar results in Montana.

Rather than continue on as Deputy Director, Ailport quit. Then, before the new director started, Shannon O’Brien helped pay him a bit more than $30,000 as a going-away present.

The board discovered this incident after removing O’Brien’s $5,000-a-month stipend in August because of a separate set of circumstances involving unauthorized spending on behalf of Montana Democrats.

Then, last week, O’Brien resigned as state party chair. In her announcement, she said she was doing so to support the Independent US Senate candidate, Seth Bodnar. The Bodnar campaign took the ball and ran, putting her on national television, securing interviews with statewide media outlets, sending endorsement-based fundraising texts, and more.

O’Brien didn’t tell Seth that, a month earlier, the party launched an investigation into her funneling party money to a friend. Obviously, in her announcement column she left out that this was a second investigation into fiscal promiscuity with donor dollars and that the board was discussing firing her at the upcoming board meeting.

That doesn’t inspire as much confidence in a fundraising mass text.

Bodnar claimed he was completely unaware of the investigation and accusations against O’Brien when the media blitz took place; I suspect willful ignorance.

Ultimately, it’s a blessing for the Montana Democratic Party and hopefully a lesson learned. It took nine months to discover the unauthorized payments to Ailport. Whatever guardrails they have currently in place are not sufficient.