John Davis Admits Using Campaign Cash For Personal Use!

Including THE BOOTS! There's more, too, but he's admitting he used campaign cash for the boots and he's returned the cash for those boots to his campaign. More on those $1500 boots below, for those who don't know what I'm talking about.

It took a couple of bloggers looking at the Campaign Finance Reports of State Representative John Davis, Republican, HD-129, to discover all sorts of things that didn't look right. A total of four complaints have been filed against him to date and the Texas Ethics Commission has agreed to investigate three of them. We are wating on a response to the fourth one which was filed about a week before the election.

We discovered that Davis had over $100,000 in undocumented expenses going back over three years, which looked suspiciously like he was using campaign cash for personal use. Ch. 2 in Houston is doing a series of reports on Houston area state representatives and senators using campaign cash for personal use. They wanted to talk to Davis about his undocumented expenses, but he wouldn't talk on camera. You can view the Ch. 2 report here. KHOU has also done a story on Davis' undocumented expenses which can be viewed here.

On November 6th, two days before the election, Davis filed numerous amended reports, including an amended report for January 1, 2006-July 31, 2006. On the cover sheet he notes, "Certain 'American Express' and other expenses have been deleted and returned to the campaign account." About $6000 from the original report from the same dates (view here) appear to be missing from this amended report, meaning that Davis admits he spent $6000 in campaign cash for personal use, which he has now returned to the campaign.

Note that on 5/29/06, in his original report, he spent over $1500 on boots at Jesse's boots in South Houston. He calls it Jersey's boots, but I did a little detective work and found out the real name of the place and went and took a few photos. Cool place, by the way. I called Davis out on those boots on my blog. And, what do you know? Those boots don't appear on his amended report on 11/06/06. Apparently the money for those boots is part of the $6000 he paid back to his campaign. So, I was right. Those $1500 boots were for personal use, not for his campaign.

Let me just say this. There are problems on this amended report. And, he filed additional amended reports back to 2005. More on all that later. Also, there are MANY officeholders who have similar offenses on their campaign finance reports with the Texas Ethics Commission. Including Democrats. More on that later, also.

For now, I'm going to put on my favorite pair of boots and savor this moment.