Jeremy Durham Audit: Disgraced Former Williamson County GOP Rep. Spent Campaign Funds Illegally, State Says

NASHVILLE, TN — Disgraced former State Rep. Jeremy Durham, a Williamson County Republican, spend thousands of dollars donated to his campaign on airplane tickets, personal items and new suits and loaned $30,000 from his campaign war chest to an ex-con professional gambler, according to an audit released Wednesday by the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance.

All in all, the TREF audit revealed roughly 500 potential violations of state campaign finance law and made as many as 39 illegal purchases with money donated to his campaign. He also made a variety of what he characterized as "loans," to his wife and to a professional gambler, and invested $100,000 in a company of a well-known Republican donor.

In addition, the audit shows that Durham reimbursed himself $7,702 out of his campaign account for items already reimbursed by the state.

Furthermore, Durham failed to report $36,335 in donations and $10,624 in interest, received more than the maximum allowable donation from multiple people and failed to disclose the information for numerous campaign contributors.

For more local coverage and breaking alerts about news that affects you, click here to subscribe to the Brentwood Patch, or find your local Middle Tennessee Patch here.

The audit also reports Durham invested more than $100,000 in Life Watch Pharmacy, owned by Andrew Miller, a Republican fundraiser, with campaign funds. He also wrote three checks, totaling $29,800, to David Whitis. While the checks themselves say they are a "loan to a friend," Durham told the auditors it was capital for a startup. Whitis is a professional gambler with a criminal past, according to an investigation by The Tennessean. Whitis has multiple driving violations, including a DUI in which he was represented by Durham, and an arrest for patronizing prostitution.

The audit found violations of six state laws, with most of those laws being broken multiple times, resulting in the 500-violation estimate. While Durham could face fines from the TREF for those violations, the board delayed action to allow for a response from the former state representative, who was expelled from the legislature in September, and his attorney, Peter Strianse.

Strianse told reporters that releasing the audit and treating it as gospel was premature and inappropriate.

“It would be akin to someone who works for a newspaper who puts together a draft of a story and they don’t even get a chance to check it for any errors, proofread it in any way, the editor of the newspaper doesn’t get to look at it and it just gets published. It goes out into the domain as if it is a fully baked cake and correct in all respects,” Strianse said.
“We raised some significant challenges to the draft report that has now been made public…I think its fundamentally unfair to have an individual to be confronted with a report that they have not been given an adequate opportunity to respond to. ... There may have been mistakes that have been made, and obviously we’d like an opportunity to correct those mistakes. If there’s poor record keeping that needs to be corrected. But some of the broad positions that are taken by the registry in the report, I don’t know if they’re supported by the law or the statute."

Ultimately, any criminal charges would have to be brought by Williamson County District Attorney-General Kim Helper. The committee issued a show-cause notice to Durham, which begins the process that could culminate in fines. Durham has until May to respond to the audit and is expected to answer for the show-cause at the committee's June meeting.

Image via State of Tennessee