Montana Senate votes to send Ellsworth investigation to Department of Justice
Allegations of criminal activity by former Montana Senate leader Jason Ellsworth are being handed over to the state Department of Justice following a heated Thursday floor debate in the Senate chambers in which minority Democrats prevailed.
Against the wishes of the Republican leadership, lawmakers voted to suspend a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into Ellsworth and send allegations of criminal official misconduct to Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen.
The move by Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers came after Republicans attempted to strip Ellsworth of a key committee assignment, at which point Flowers said the political motivations of Ellsworth’s own party made it impossible to adjudicate the 2023 Senate president fairly.
“It shined a bright light on what this is about, from my perspective,” Flowers said. “If this was going to continue for next week, two weeks, three weeks of this process, it was time to get it out of this body. Let us get to work on actual legislation and let the Department of Justice do the investigation.”
Republicans have openly stated that Ellsworth is guilty since news broke that he awarded $170,100 in contracted work to a former business associate, Bryce Eggleston. Ethics proceedings against the Hamilton Republican were launched after a brief investigation in which neither Ellsworth nor Eggleston were interviewed. Initially when selecting an attorney to prosecute the case, Senate President Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, chose Matt Monforton, a lawyer and former Republican legislator who had been disparaging Ellsworth on social media for several days.
With support from a handful of Republicans, Democrats managed a 27-22 win to send the Ellsworth matter to prosecutors at the DOJ. The chamber has 32 Republicans and 18 Democrats. Ellsworth voted with the Democrats to send his case to Knudsen.
Ellsworth is accused of splitting the contract awarded to Eggleston into two agreements to avoid state law requiring contracts of $100,000 or more to be competitively bid. The split contract, and questions about Eggleston’s ability to do the work, are the foundation of the Senate’s case against its former leader.
Under the agreement, Eggleston was to observe and report on state agencies as they put into practice laws proposed by Republican legislators to limit the power of Montana courts.
Monday, a Senate Ethics Committee of two Republicans and two Democrats formalized the allegations against Ellsworth, identifying two potential violations of the law: official misconduct, a misdemeanor punishable with up to six months in jail; and failure to disclose a conflict of interest.
At one point in the Monday proceeding, Ellsworth’s attorney, Joan Mell, suggested that any criminal allegations be left to the state Department of Administration to identify and, if warranted, referred to the county attorney.
Senate Republicans on Thursday responded in acrimony after Flowers succeeded in delivering the case to the Department of Justice. Republican Sen. Daniel Emrich of Great Falls announced that he would attempt expulsion votes against both Ellsworth and Flowers on Friday.
Emrich then accused Flowers of referring to Ellsworth as the minority leader’s “golden goose,” for delivering just enough Republican votes for the chamber’s 18 Democrats to control the Senate. The allegation brought every Democrat in the chamber to their feet in defense of Flowers as he demanded Emrich not be allowed to make false statements.
Several Republicans voiced disappointment about referring the Ellsworth matter to the attorney general.
“I am angry. I am embarrassed and angry,” said Sen. John Fuller, R-Kalispell. “And you do not want to see me angry because I have been known to hold a grudge for a long time.”
At one point in the debate, Billings GOP Sen. Tom McGillvray, who had attempted to remove Ellsworth from the powerful Senate Finance and Claims Committee, announced that he was in communication via text message with Attorney General Knudsen and that Knudsen had indicated the Senate couldn’t defer the criminal matter to the Department of Justice. That was met with gestures of disagreement by the four attorneys serving as Democrats in the Senate. The Republican majority doesn’t include an attorney.
“The duties of the attorney general are to be able to appoint a county attorney, when ordered or directed, to institute and prosecute and put in the proper court,” said Sen. Shane Morigeau, a Democrat and attorney from Missoula. “I think what we did today is we’ve made a point very clear that there have been allegations of official misconduct, of criminal activity.”
Republicans suggested that handing the Ellsworth matter to prosecutors would assure the outcome of the investigation into his actions wouldn’t be decided before the 2025 Legislature ended.
The simmering subtext was that Senate conservatives had identified Ellsworth as a moderate voter capable of preventing hard-right members of the party from killing key legislation like continuing an expanded Medicaid eligibility, which Republican moderates and Democrats have managed to keep alive for a decade.
The first Senate floor session of the Legislature was just 15 minutes old when Senate Democrats staged a revolt by partnering with Ellsworth and a handful of other Republicans to secure better committee assignments for eight lawmakers stuck on a committee which they said had no real purpose. In doing so, they populated key committees with moderate voters capable of derailing conservative Republican priorities.
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This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.