A campaign adviser to one of Lisa Miller’s opponents, a member of the Polk County School Board, has been accused of sending anonymous text messages about her during last year’s campaign.
Prosecutors in the 10th Judicial Circuit on Friday indicted James Earl Dunn Jr., a Texas resident who advised Jill Sessions’ campaign. Dunn, 52, is charged with seven counts of text message disclosure violations, a first-degree misdemeanor carrying a maximum sentence of one year in prison.
Polk County voters received anonymous text messages in June falsely claiming that Miller and her husband Bob Miller were under criminal investigation. Miller, a Lakeland resident, was then involved in a three-way campaign for the School Board’s District 7 with Sessions and Dell Quary.
The text messages did not identify the sender, as is required for campaign messages under state election laws.
In a court filing, prosecutors accused Dunn of sending the text messages between June 20 and July 1.
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Miller, who was seeking a second term, came first in the August election but failed to secure a majority. The sessions came second, forcing a runoff election that was held in November.
Miller won the runoff by a margin of 11.2 percentage points.
An affidavit filed Friday says prosecutors opened an investigation on July 1 based on a complaint by Miller. According to the report, the text messages came from five phone numbers, three in the Polk County area code and two in the 786 area code, which includes Miami-Dade County.
Miller told investigators she immediately suspected Dunn, as she told reporters last summer.
Details of the investigation
The affidavit provides these details:
Investigators found a copy of an email from Terry Clark, a school board candidate in another county, which said Dunn had sent more than 20,000 text messages “across the country.” Campaign records show that both Clark and Sessions made campaign expenses of $7,500 to Dunn, and Clark credited Dunn as his campaign manager.
Investigators interviewed Clark at his home on July 11. Clark denied involvement in sending the text messages attacking Miller, saying he didn’t know who sent them.
The investigator also interviewed Sessions, who said Dunn served as a “political strategist” for her campaign. She said Dunn told her he planned to use text messaging as part of his strategy to support her campaign.
Sessions said Dunn told her he had sent text messages for her campaign but said she had not approved them and was unaware of the content. When Sessions was shown one of the text messages targeting Miller, Dunn told her that “he had someone send it.”
Sessions said that after seeing the lyrics, she confronted Dunn and told him she didn’t want him to send messages without her consent.
In August, prosecutors received a response to a subpoena from uCampaign, a company that provides applications for Republican candidates’ campaigns. The subpoena was for the three 863 area codes used to send the text messages.
The subpoena revealed that three payments had been made to have the texts sent using an email address that included Dunn’s name. An investigator determined that the credit card used to pay for the services was issued to Dunn through a Texas credit union. The footage also listed Dunn’s cell phone number.
The investigator reviewed a document from uCampaign that showed the text messages matched those received by Polk County voters, which described Miller as an “extremist” candidate. The 786 area code corresponded to Kayla Hensley and Grant Kiley, identified as founders of KAG Strategies, a Houston-based political consulting firm.
Documents obtained by subpoena showed that a credit card associated with Hensley and Kiley was used to pay for text messages to be sent through Project Broadcast.
In January, the investigator called Kiley and left a voicemail. He reached Hensley on the phone and she said she would speak to an attorney. Neither had called the investigator back after filing the affidavit.
District Judge Keith Spoto authorized a search warrant to search for emails exchanged between Dunn’s email address and the addresses used by Hensley and Kiley. Investigators found an email Dunn sent to Clark outlining his strategy for reaching voters and said he had “two people working on it.”
In December, investigators contacted Dunn by phone. Dunn said he wanted to speak to an attorney and either he or the attorney would get back to you. As of March, investigators had heard from neither.
While Hensley and Kiley’s names have been linked to Project Broadcast’s account, the investigator wrote that he “probably has reason to believe that James Dunn orchestrated the sending of these illegal messages.”
‘I have no comment’
Reached by phone on Friday, Dunn said, “I have no comment.”
Dunn has a history of crime in his home state of Texas. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to filing fraudulent claims against the federal government. Dunn, then the owner and operator of Rehab Specialist Inc., received contracts from the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services to provide vocational rehabilitation training to people with intellectual and physical disabilities, according to a U.S. Department of Justice press release.
The Department of Education awarded Dunn’s company more than $300,000, but the company failed to provide the services, the release said. Dunn was sentenced to 33 months in prison.
Clark reportedly said in a text message to supporters that Dunn also supported the campaign of Rick Nolte, who unseated school board member Sarah Fortney. Nolte reported no payments to Dunn in campaign reports.
The Polk County Republican Party endorsed and promoted Sessions, Clark, Nolte and another candidate, Justin Sharpless, in the bipartisan school board election. County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative political group based in Mulberry, invited Dunn for a podcast interview early in the campaign, in which he boasted about a 25-0 record in Texas school board races for “Judeo-Christian Republicans “ to have set up.
“It is unfortunate that the CCDF decided to bring a criminal here for my opponent to hire to use illegal and harmful tactics to try to tarnish my and my husband’s reputation with lies and slander.” Miller said in an emailed statement. “Polk County voters have emerged to a record victory because they recognize that campaigning should be about a commitment to serving leadership, not outside interest groups raising shady PAC money. Hopefully this sends a message that the judiciary is serious about protecting everyone and protecting the integrity of the democratic process in this county and state.
Group CEO Steve Maxwell said he met Dunn in Texas and introduced him to local candidates, but that CCDF is not involved in school board campaigns. Maxwell said Miller called him last year after the texts were sent and he immediately began investigating the matter. He said he spent $10,000 of his own money on the effort and shared the findings with prosecutors.
Maxwell said both he and CCDF’s attorney asked Dunn about the text messages and in both cases denied any involvement.
“I can understand. Lisa might blame us because we were the conduit that got him here,” Maxwell said. “But we had nothing to do with what he did and I’m just as mad at him like everyone else.”
Sessions did not immediately respond to a voicemail left early Friday afternoon.
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.
