PINKSTON’S SELF-INFLICTED WOUND
District Attorney General Neal Pinkston’s parsed words, denials and halftruths about employing his wife and brother-in-law remind us of a certain former president who was never able to quite tell the truth about his relationship with a White House intern.
On Wednesday, investigators for the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office released a report stating Pinkston had violated the state nepotism law by employing the pair, specifically, the Tennessee State Employees Uniform Nepotism Policy Act.
Since the issue first came to light last May, when the district attorney general was asked during a budget hearing whether he had any relatives employed by the county, he has bobbed and weaved and ducked in his answers. In August, he moved the two from state employees to the county payroll — with healthy raises — amid concerns state law did not allow one relative to supervise another within state government.
He declined to talk to Hamilton County Commission members about their concerns, and he has refused comment to the media beyond a statement he released last spring.
Pinkston’s actions throughout the ordeal have been the opposite of what county residents should expect from the man elected to be the county’s top prosecutor, a man who is supposed to know the law and a man who is expected to be transparent in his dealings with the public.
Hours after the report was released Wednesday, the district attorney general’s office announced in a statement that Pinkston’s wife, Melydia Clewell, and his brother-in-law, Kerry Clewell, had been put on leave. He said he was “reviewing the recommendations of the comptroller’s office and may have additional comments at a later date.”
His office declined to say whether the leave for the two was paid or unpaid.
The report comes at a particularly inconvenient time for Pinkston. He is facing opposition for re-election in the May Republican primary from Coty Wamp, who serves as general counsel for the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. The winner of that race has a Democratic opponent in the August general election in former county commissioner John Allen Brooks.
Pinkston and Wamp already have been at odds this year over a Soddy-Daisy incident in which Wamp tried to intervene to alert authorities, upon learning certain information, that officers had arrented the wrong man. Pinkston referred the incident to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), citing witness tampering by Wamp. The Nashville district attorney, brought in to review the case, said Pinkston was right to refer the case to the TBI but has yet to say anything about the witness tampering charge.
Wamp said the move was politically motivated.
After Wednesday’s report was released, she said Pinkston “has proven time and time again that he either doesn’t know the law or simply doesn’t care about it,” and that Pinkston’s action was both “a violation of state law” and “a violation of public trust.”
The report from the comptroller’s office suggests the district attorney general moving his relatives from state to county employ did not mitigate the policy in the state nepotism act, which states that “no state employees who are relatives shall be placed within the same direct line of supervision whereby one relative is responsible for supervising the job performance or work activities of another relative.”
It further states a county district attorney is a position established by the state and is considered a state agency, which therefore makes any employee in the office considered a state employee.
Pinkston, in his original statement in May, said he’d done nothing wrong — indeed, that his decisions “are both legal and ethical.”
His story is that he hired Clewell as the public information officer for his staff, then the two fell in love. They married in November 2019 in Marion County, a fact that suggested to state Sen. Todd Gardenhire that they were hiding something. It was Gardenhire who had requested the investigation following the budget hearing questions.
“It’s a shame that General Pinkston drew this out like he did when he had many people telling him that it was wrong,” the state senator said. “He had to have known it was wrong or he wouldn’t have snuck out of town and kept his marriage secret and then quietly tried to play games with shifting resources to cover up his obvious, flagrant violation of that particular law.”
If any public servant insists on playing word games, modeling a lack of transparency and shuffling employees to gain a means to an end, the public is ill served. But in the case of Pinkston, it is his actions that have brought him to this point, and it is his actions on which voters will soon judge him.