Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: OC GOP Chairman Lies About Nick, CPA Issue (Part 2)

To read Part 1 of this article, click here.

We’ve already established that OC GOP chairman Fred Whitaker’s entire premise for seeking Adam Nick’s resignation from the Lake Forest City Council is based on a falsehood. Nick said he would resign if there was anything he produced that claimed he was a Certified Public Accountant; Whitaker is telling people that Nick said he would resign if it could be proven he was not a CPA.

Here’s a breakdown of the second half of Whitaker’s press release calling for Nick’s resignation, which Whitaker sent in an email blast.

It states: Adding insult to injury, Adam Nick voluntarily offered to resign his City Council seat if any evidence that he wasn’t a CPA could be produced. His offer was made on a local news website and can be viewed by clicking here.

The facts: As mentioned above, Nick offered to resign his Council seat if anyone could produce any written material that was produced by him in which he claims to be a CPA. Whitaker, an attorney whose firm, according to Nick, has been eyeing the taking over of legal services for the City for four years, will likely be awarded the nearly $1.4 million budget contract as the City Attorney if Dwight Robinson is reelected and maintains the Council majority with Andrew Hamilton and Scott Voigts. Yet Whitaker is so sloppy that he can’t even get the premise of the CPA argument correct. Assuming Whitaker is competent, one must assume his depiction of the facts are, in his own words, “willfully misrepresented” to discredit Nick – both now and in the court case a few years ago.

The author of the news piece Whitaker cites, James Ross, apparently has no journalistic background, nor is he a registered voter in Lake Forest. Nick believes Ross is a pseudonym for Mayor Andrew Hamilton who, if we’re talking about ethics and integrity, created two copycat Facebook websites of the same name as existing sites in an devious attempt to siphon off readers looking for information about Lake Forest and the recall. Hamilton also secretly videotaped citizens and edited their comments for his own purpose, and then posted the video to the copycat site. Is it a coincidence that the first appearance of the CPA claim is on Hamilton’s copycat site, and that Hamilton himself is a CPA? The letter from the California Board of Accountancy was addressed to Nick at City Hall; that was done by the anonymous “whistleblower” so that the letter would become part of the public record. The person who put in the Public Records Act request to receive the CBA letter was someone who identified himself as LFTruth, a pseudonym at one time used by a commenter on Patch that Nick claimed during a Council meeting was Hamilton; Hamilton did not deny it. Coincidentally, the letter from the CBA, which acts quickly on such claims, took place less than a week after the district attorney dropped its charges against Nick for removing the campaign signs of Hamilton, Voigts and water district candidate Jose Vergara.

Nick has maintained all along that the material used in this CPA matter “was Photo-shopped,” and that he had no contact with the League of Women Voters until he was notified by the CBA on the matter and asked that “/CPA” be removed from his profile. Although Photo-shopping is one excuse, the other might be less nefarious; a well-meaning intern or volunteer may have errantly changed “Accountant” to “Accountant/CPA” because she assumed the two went hand-in-hand (the candidate profiles are definitely edited because of their conformity); or perhaps the site was hacked and the information added (we can blame it on the Russians). Or maybe it was photo-shopped as Nick said. Take a look at the photo on the very evidence Nick’s critics cite; it shows Nick with broken front teeth. Nick’s official campaign photo from 2012 doesn’t have broken teeth. Note that in the previous link from 2012, Nick refers to himself as an "accountant by trade"; no mention of CPA.

It states: “This latest development is just another example of Adam Nick’s reckless behavior and continual ethical lapses as an elected official. He promised to vacate his seat on the Lake Forest City Council if it could be proven that he wasn’t a licensed CPA – and now we have that proof. For the good of the residents of Lake Forest and the Republican Party of Orange County, I call on Adam Nick to keep his word and resign.”

The facts: What reckless behavior and “continual ethical lapses” is Whitaker referring to? His shotgun approach shows a lack of dedication to sharing the actual truth, but it’s clear that when it comes to Lake Forest, he is unable to be truthful. Facts escape him, but he’s hoping the rhetoric will stick; just like the Nick is Nuts smear campaign, Fred J. Whitaker has resorted to throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks in the minds of Lake Forest voters. Whitaker falsely states, “He promised to vacate his seat …. if it could be proven that he wasn’t a licensed CPA – and now we have that proof.” It’s not a revelation that Nick isn’t a CPA. He has never claimed to be a CPA. He didn’t portray himself as that at the candidate forum in 2012, didn’t portray himself as that on his campaign literature, didn’t portray himself as that on his official candidate statement.

“I would have been foolish to try to do that,” Nick said. “Peter Herzog and Terry Anderson each are 10 times smarter than Robinson, Hamilton and Voigts put together and would have jumped all over that at the time if that had been the case. In 1982, someone might have been able to get away with a claim of such sort, but in 2012 with the advent of the internet, it would have been easy and instantaneous for my political adversaries to find information on the internet to my detriment.”

Herzog was a longstanding councilman at the time, and Anderson, a Certified Financial Planner CFP), were running for the same office as Nick at the time.

Whitaker, playing the sheriff, “for the good residents of Lake Forest and the Republican Party of Orange County” calls on Adam Nick “to keep his word and resign.” Nick says he will keep his word, provided someone can “find one written piece produced by me … that asserts what you’ve been spreading and I resign today.” That was the promise, not the fabricated drivel projected from Whitaker’s all-too-active mouth.

If Whitaker, chairman of a Republican party that is losing ground in Orange County, is looking for ethical lapses and reckless behavior, perhaps he should look at the players who are closer to his heart. He should look at Voigts’ penchant for lying to the people of Lake Forest, most notably when he said from the Council dais “I did not wear a wire” regarding his attempt to entrap Nick, or the number of campaign signs Voigts has placed illegally on sign posts and light standards and in the public right of way before the time allowable by law. Voigts is a politician, right-hand man to termed-out Assemblyman Don Wagner.

Maybe Whitaker should take a closer look at Hamilton, who received fewer votes for his election in 2014 than signatures for his recall in 2016. Maybe Whitaker should look at Hamilton abruptly ending a City Council meeting with three items still on the agenda because he was too inept to run a meeting in front of six people, or the contentiousness Hamilton has fostered at City Hall with his thick arrogance and thin skin. Or maybe Whitaker should give a second look to those copycat Facebook sites to deceive the electorate, or those secretly taped videos consisting primarily of women who, apparently, had husbands who couldn’t find Hamilton’s front door. Hamilton, who was fast-tracked to the mayorship in Lake Forest, is a staunch Republican who penned most of the hateful, bigoted literature against Nick and Recall supporters while Robinson, Voigts, the Lincoln Club and the O.C. Sheriff’s Association financed the smear campaign.

Maybe Whitaker should take a closer look at his boy Robinson, whose excuse two weeks ago for lying on the candidate statement was that the 200-word limit on the candidate statement didn’t allow him to provide full disclosure. Or maybe Whitaker should look at Robinson, who Whitaker gave the “Local Elected Official of the Year” award in January even though he ignored fulfilling his campaign promises, ignored the pleas of residents who sought to make their street safer, and ignored the pleas of residents not to sign a contract with the county’s notorious high-kill animal shelter. Maybe Whitaker should look at Robinson for voting against things that matter to residents, such as term limits totaling eight years, or against a Sunshine Ordinance to guarantee more government transparency and ethics, or against allowing Meals on Wheels to use empty space at City Hall, or voting against a ban on corporate campaign contributions. Maybe Whitaker should look at Robinson for being, as one resident called it, a local symbol of hate and cruelty. Maybe Whitaker should look at Robinson for calling a recall supporter a thug and her attacker a victim, and for not trying to facilitate a civil process for going about the recall; there’s video of the attack if Whitaker needs actual facts although it’s clear he doesn’t.

Has Nick said things in the heat of the moment? Yes. So has Robinson, who called his colleagues Nick and Jim Gardner imbeciles and morons. But ethical lapses? Why did Robinson wait a year to bring up the so-called racial slur in a censure meeting? Because Hamilton had been elected and Robinson knew he had the votes to put on a show at Nick’s expense. Why did Robinson wait until after the recall deadline before admitting the smear campaign against Nick and Lake Forest residents before acknowledging it was “over the top”? Because he wanted to make sure he benefited from the smear campaign.

Whitaker gives attorneys a bad name. Often they are sharp, and those who go into public service do so with the intentions of making their own communities a better place. But Whitaker is not sharp, and he’s showing he wants his dull blade to scrape a hole into the fabric of Lake Forest.

Maybe Whitaker ought to look in the mirror.

About the author: Martin Henderson won several Los Angeles and Orange County press club awards while an editor at Patch in 2012-13.