AUGUSTA, Maine — State Sen. Jim Libby’s gubernatorial campaign was hit Thursday with an ethics complaint citing audio from a phone call in which a top staffer offers to pay someone under the table to help the Republican lawmaker qualify for public financing.
The complaint to the Maine Ethics Commission from primary rival David Jones revolves around Phil Hendricks, Libby’s campaign manager. Hendricks was also working to coordinate the signature drive for a referendum planned for the 2026 ballot that aims to overturn Maine’s law allowing transgender girls to participate in sports under their gender identity.
On the call, Hendricks offers to give a signature gatherer a bonus on signatures gathered for the referendum campaign for every 25 contributions he gathered to help qualify Libby for Maine’s taxpayer-funded Clean Election program. That would violate tight state laws around the program, although there is no evidence that Libby’s campaign paid people in this manner.
“He did not collect any [contributions] and was given zero money,” Hendricks said in a brief phone interview of the signature gatherer who recorded the call and gave it to the Jones campaign.
Hendricks declined to answer further questions on the campaign’s practices, saying Libby’s campaign may issue a fuller response. Jones’ campaign sent the audio to reporters on Wednesday evening and filed the formal complaint on Thursday. The four-member ethics commission is set to consider whether it will investigate at a meeting on Feb. 25.
“Protecting the integrity of our elections and the proper use of taxpayer funds begins by holding everyone, including those within our own party, accountable,” Jones, a real estate agent from Falmouth, said in a statement.
It’s the first major ethics complaint of the 10-person Republican primary for the Blaine House, which is being vacated by the term-limited Gov. Janet Mills. The candidates are mostly little-known political outsiders. Jones is running as an ardent backer of President Donald Trump, while Libby is highlighting his experience as a long-serving lawmaker from Standish.
Libby is the only prominent gubernatorial candidate running under the state’s Clean Election program. It requires candidates to get $5 payments from 3,200 people to qualify for at least $530,000 to run in a primary. Candidates are limited to raising small “seed money” contributions before then and can collect more payments to unlock funding later in campaigns.
The difficulty of using the program as well as the hard limits on funding have limited its use in gubernatorial elections since Maine voters expanded the Clean Election system in 2015. Most candidates raise money privately. The program is commonly used in legislative races, although Democrats have historically used it more amid some Republican resistance to it.
Libby is trying to qualify for the program at the same time as he and other candidates are gathering the required 2,000 signatures from registered voters to make the primary ballot. The referendum period overlapped further with that work, putting lots of people doing campaign work in public at the same time.
Hendricks and Ezra Hickey, the person who recorded the call, are listed on state-mandated disclosures as signature gatherers on the referendum effort. Hickey has also worked for Jones’ campaign.
On the audio of the call, Hendricks tries to persuade Hickey to help Libby, saying he could structure payments “under the table” but would have to trust his intentions.
“It would be essentially something that could damage the campaign in really good relationships, if there were any issues with the payments,” he said on the call.