SPECIAL REPORT
Members of the Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC) as well as anyone who has regularly attended their weekly meetings or read the weekly newsletters published by OCPAC’s President Bob Linn, know that for the last two plus years Linn has used that platform to publicly attack the Office of State Auditor & Inspector (SAI) in general, and current SAI Cindy Byrd in specific.
Over that time period, Linn’s criticism of Byrd has primarily focused on the office’s response to his Open Records Request (ORR) for records pertaining to the SAI audit of the Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH). If you remember, prior to Byrd’s tenure as SAI a huge scandal broke out surrounding the OSDH when their internal accounting system incorrectly showed approximately $30M of taxpayer money was missing, which resulted in nearly 200 OSDH employees being laid-off statewide.
Throughout most of 2021, Linn repeatedly accused Byrd of being part of an elaborate cover-up by slow-walking her office’s response to his ORR – though Linn never actually said what he thought she was “covering up.” Linn has intimated that the alleged “missing” $30M was due to malfeasance or dereliction of duty on behalf of the SAI (and not the OSDH despite their flawed internal accounting system) and has leveled the bulk of the responsibility for that on Byrd, supposedly for her alleged refusal to completely respond to his ORR in a timely manner.
Linn’s outrage has puzzled many OCPAC attendees on two accounts:
- During the time period that Linn alleges the SAI was “responsible” for the OSDH accounting errors, Byrd was assigned to the office’s County Audit Division out of Ada, and was not party to the OSDH audit; and
- As revealed in a recently discovered letter Auditor Byrd wrote to the OCPAC Board of Directors,Byrd did respond fully and completely to his ORR.
What has made Linn’s relentless attacks on Byrd especially puzzling is that it represents a 180º turnaround for Linn after OCPAC unanimously endorsed Byrd during her 2018 campaign. During that election, Byrd racked up a commanding victory, outpacing even Governor Stitt by over 174,000 votes on the way to receiving the most votes for a statewide official ever in the history of the state with over 818,000 Oklahomans supporting her.
Because of this, Ignite Liberty recently called Linn to attempt to ascertain a better understanding of why he has focused so much of his ire on Byrd. He requested we send any questions about Byrd to him in writing. We sent him the following question:
“If Cindy Byrd was not the auditor in charge of the OSDH audit re: the “missing” $30M, why have you continued to attack her for the audit and not focused all of your attacks on Gary Jones…especially when OCPAC donated money to her campaign and openly supported her?
Much of your weekly emails have accused her office of trying to keep information hidden from you, and accused them of delaying responding to your ORR. Yet in the end you stated today that you got everything you asked for. You also stated today that they should have just copied files over easily. My own experience with requesting ORR from state agencies is that it does take a while to get the information back. Regulatory procedures required for ORR/FOIA requests do require an agency to do their due diligence to ensure information subject to the privacy act/ongoing criminal investigations/or other information not subject to FOIA are redacted. Do you feel like the time they took to fulfill your ORR was unreasonable?”
Not surprisingly, we have never received a response.
Clues In The Past
We began reviewing the timeline of Linn’s comments about Cindy from the time Linn took over as President of OCPAC in the summer of 2018 through the present to see if we could pinpoint when his attitude began to change. What we discovered unlocked a treasure trove of clues.
Linn’s first public attacks on Byrd were in October 7th, 2020, immediately following the release of the SAI Audit of Epic Charter Schools. You can see the entirety of Linn’s comments below:
Ignite Liberty was present at that meeting and remember well the shock that ripped through the audience following his statements. His comments were part of an introduction of Brian Hobbs, who spoke to the OCPAC audience to defend Epic’s founders, Ben Harris and David Chaney, in light of the release of the damning audit. Those comments are below:
The attacks at the October 7th meeting mirror those in the October 5th newsletter. However, all newsletters for 2020 have been scrubbed not only from OCPAC’s website, but from archive.org as well (the “Wayback Machine”).
It was shortly after this that Linn submitted his ORR for the now 2-year-old OSDH audit – which Byrd was not party to – that he since has used to repeatedly badger Byrd and her office.
To many who attend OCPAC regularly, and those who watch online, Linn’s use of the OSDH ORR to attack Byrd – even going so far as to bring in a “expert” by the name of Steve Anderson to help – has made no sense whatsoever.
Given that the pivot point in his behavior was not the OSDH scandal, but the SAI audit of Epic Charter Schools – which Linn has repeatedly praised and defended – reason would have it that the Linn’s use of the OSDH scandal has been a blatant attempt to cast public doubt on the veracity of the Epic audit. After all, if he can somehow prove that the Byrd used her office to “cover up” the scandal at the OSDH through denying or slow-walking his ORR, then his allegations that she is using her office to engage in a witch hunt of the Epic founders would carry some weight.
There are two problems with this:
- As mentioned above, Byrd was not connected in any way to the OSDH Audit, and fully answered and complete Linn’s ORR for the OSDH Audit files. In our phone call with Linn, he even admitted that “we got everything we asked for. Nothing was redacted.”
- The Investigative Audit of Epic Charter Schools was ordered by Governor Stitt pursuant to 74 O.S. § 212(c). Not once has Linn criticized the Governor for ordering the audit. Instead, he used Steve Anderson to attack the veracity of the audit’s findings, and then continued to use Anderson to attack Byrd’s response to the ORR of the OSDH Audit.
Those familiar with the tactics used by renowned Marxist activist Saul Alinsky (mentor to Hillary Clinton among others) know that one of his favorite tactics was to attack an demonize the messenger – not the message – in order to destroy that messenger’s credibility to the public.
If Linn is correct and the finding of the Epic audit are indeed flawed then he may have a point in accusing Byrd of using her office to attack “two guys who provide a great service at half the cost and make millions doing it” (Linn’s frequent characterization of Harris and Chaney).
If, however, the Epic audit is grounded in the law and on well-documented facts, then the members of OCPAC should ask the OCPAC board why its President is using Alinsky-style tactics to demonize an elected official carrying out her sworn duty…for such action is usually only done when the person making the accusations has something to lose, be it in monetary gain, power, or both.
To get to the bottom of all of this, we decided to dig into the audit ourselves to determine whether the SAI’s findings carry substance. In an upcoming series of articles, we will lay out our findings including many facts that the main stream media – and most of the “conservative” media – has ignored.
It is not the purpose of this investigation to assign guilt or innocence to Harris, Chaney and Company – and should note that at the time of publication charges have yet to be filed. It is the purpose of this investigation to see whether Linn’s accusations against Byrd are warranted.
What we did find, and will endeavor to make clear, is that when SAI Byrd stated publicly that the office’s findings in the Epic audit was “the largest example of public fraud in the history of the State”, that statement was not made lightly.
There is powerful, convincing evidence not only to justify the call for the audit, but to thoroughly justify Byrd’s assessment. As you read the articles to follow, we urge the readers to ask “did Bob Linn know about all of this…and if so, why did he try so hard to defend the actions of Epic Youth Service (EYS)?”
It’s a question that every member of OCPAC…every conservative in the State of Oklahoma should be asking.
