Are we piling on? Smelling vulnerability and jumping on the bandwagon? I don’t think so. Nathan Deal has been my Congressman since I moved here at the end of 2003, and has long been a source of embarrassment. He was beyond lackluster and resigned his seat just in time to avoid being brought up on Ethics charges by the U.S. House. He barely beat Karen Handel [
fox vs fox2…] in the Republican Primary partly by showing distorted ads suggesting she supported a group that tried to recruit children into homosexuality [
naming three post offices…], a blatant untruth [lie]. Now, his own fiscal irresponsibility is on the line. It’s not just his financial woes, he hid them through the Primary.
When Nathan Deal filed personal disclosure statements in the U.S. Congress, he described himself as a “partner” in a “family business” with his daughter and son-in-law. When Carrie Deal Wilder and her husband, Clint, filed a bankruptcy petition last year, however, they described themselves as the “100 percent stockholder” of Wilder Outdoors, the sporting goods store they opened in 2006 in Habersham County. Her father, by then a candidate for governor, was mentioned nowhere in documents the couple filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Gainesville.
The bankruptcy proceedings allowed the Wilders to walk away from the business, debt-free. It left Deal and his wife, Sandra, with millions invested, and lost, in Wilder Outdoors. Over the past week, Deal has framed his financial situation as the result of a father and a mother helping a child. In a news conference and in an e-mail message to supporters, Deal said the hardships caused by Wilder Outdoors’ collapse help him relate to Georgians’ struggles through a long economic downturn.
Documents examined by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggest, however, that Deal’s role in the failed business went beyond that of simply a co-signer on a series of business loans. It also is clear that the omissions in the Wilders’ bankruptcy filings — whether inadvertent or intentional — insulated Deal from political fallout during a hard-fought Republican primary campaign. The Wilders declared bankruptcy in July 2009, two months after Deal launched his campaign for governor.
As first reported last week by the AJC, Deal lost his initial investment in Wilder Outdoors – about $2 million, according to campaign aides – and is personally responsible for a nearly $2.3 million loan payment that is due Feb. 1. To pay that debt, Deal and his wife are trying to sell their home in Gainesville, as well as the Habersham County site of Wilder Outdoors. The debt, however, exceeds the net value of all the Deals’ property and other holdings, financial disclosure statements indicate.
In an interview Monday, Deal said that when he invested in Wilder Outdoors, he did not know his son-in-law had previously declared bankruptcy. Clint Wilder did not disclose that 2001 bankruptcy in the 2009 filing, an oversight that could invalidate the proceedings. A spokeswoman for the federal bankruptcy trustee would not comment Monday on whether it is investigating the omission of Clint Wilder’s previous bankruptcy…
Simply put, he’s corrupt and it’s caught up with him. He had a lucrative auto salvage business with a guaranteed income from the State. When that was threatened, as a US Congressman, he personally interceded to keep his gravy train alive [big no-no]. He’s misstated his finances and business involvements repeatedly. Here, he skirted his financial liability by staying off his son-in-law’s and daughter’s bankruptcy filing. Whoops. His son-in-law filed bankruptcy in 2009 but he was actually ineligible because of a previous bankruptcy in 2001. With each infraction, Deal comes up with some lame explanation, yet all of these things are simply true. Taken as a whole, they paint a very clear picture of not just a guy
with a bad investment – he
is a bad investment. He tells us he’s not going to bankrupt himself and that he’ll meet his obligations. He has a $2.3 M debt secured with properties in
Gainesville,
Baldwin, and a
house on the Chattahoochie River. It looks kind of bleak for skating this time.
With all of that, he still might be elected based on… based on nothing really, other than oft-repeated platitudes…
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