Emails show lieutenant governor’s staff engaged in campaign-related matters during business hours

DOVER, Del. — According to emails obtained by The Associated Press, Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s office staff was in regular contact with her husband and other people involved in her campaign for Delaware governor last year and worked during office hours to facilitate the use of campaign funds.

The emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that Hall-Long enlisted her office staff, working with her husband, to help with matters that had little or no relevance to her role as lieutenant governor. They included renewing her memberships in various women’s groups and making donations to community groups. Some of those expenditures were made with campaign funds.

Delaware law prohibits state employees from engaging in political activities during working hours. As an elected official, Hall-Long is exempt from that provision, but her office workers are not.

Among the officials handling communications related to Hall-Long’s campaign was Matthew Dougherty, director of operations for the lieutenant governor’s office. Dougherty recently took a leave of absence to serve as Hall-Long’s campaign manager. The move came after the latest in a series of changes to Hall-Long’s troubled campaign, as two top aides left in the wake of a campaign finance audit conducted by the state elections department.

“Bethany asked if you would please send a check for $300 to the address below for an upcoming community event,” Dougherty wrote to Hall-Long’s husband, Dana Long, during business hours on a Wednesday afternoon last August. Hall-Long’s planner and coordinator, Nicole Algarin, received a copy of the email.

“Hi Dana, they just called about this,” Dougherty wrote in a follow-up email two weeks later. “Can we (sic) mail the check?”

Dougherty sent a second reminder to Long a week later, “according to our text conversation.” Long responded the next day that the check had been put in the mail. A campaign finance report shows that $300 was paid to Ali Abdul-Aleem of Dover for a “Community Unity Family Day” from Hall-Long’s campaign account.

Hall-Long’s office staff, along with aides who work for the state behavioral health consortium she chairs, also worked together to arrange for her to appear in the annual Sea Witch Costume Parade in Rehoboth Beach last October. Algarin then sent an email during office hours to Brandon Cox, then Hall-Long’s campaign manager, with information about the parade.

Photos from the event show Hall-Long marching in the parade without any indication that she represents the lieutenant governor’s office or the Behavioral Health Consortium. Instead, she walks in front of a banner that reads, “Bethany Hall-Long Democrat for Governor.”

Dana Long also worked with Dougherty during business hours to arrange trips for Hall-Long to Nashville and San Antonio last year, according to emails. It’s unclear whether those trips were for personal or professional reasons.

Dougherty told Long in an email that he would like to book a luxury hotel in San Antonio using “the BHL credit card,” but Long responded that he had not yet decided which hotel “we would stay at.”

There are no travel-related expenses for those dates in Hall-Long’s campaign finance reports or in the expenditures reported by the lieutenant governor’s office. Hall-Long also did not report any gifts or honoraria on her public servant financial disclosure form.

Hall-Long did not immediately respond to an email Wednesday requesting information about those trips.

Hall-Long, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, has been under intense scrutiny since September, when she abruptly announced that a campaign rally with Democratic Gov. John Carney scheduled for the next day would be postponed, saying she had “a personal, private matter to attend to.”

In reality, Hall-Long’s campaign was in disarray after people hired to run it discovered major discrepancies when reviewing years of financial reports. The scandal led to the resignation of her campaign manager, chief fundraiser and campaign treasurer — who had replaced Dana Long as treasurer just five months earlier.

A forensic investigation released last month by the Department of Elections found that from January 2016 to December 2023, Dana Long wrote 112 checks from his wife’s campaign committee account to himself or cash, and one check to his wife. The checks totaled just under $300,000 and should have been reported as campaign expenses, the investigation found. Instead, 109 were never reported on initial financial reports, and the other four, made payable to Dana Long, were reported as being made to someone else, the investigation found.

Hall-Long has maintained that the campaign finance irregularities were simply “accounting errors” involving loans she made to her campaign but failed to report. New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, has called for a federal investigation into Hall-Long’s campaign finances.