The newly re-elected Democrat Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, has been mired in an ethics and sex scandal that started just before his re-election. He ran for re-election, anyway, denying all charges. But today, Oregon’s Secretary of State, Kate Brown, has hastily and unexpectedly flown back home from Washington D.C. and now rumors abound that the Governor is going to resign.
Oregon’s Secretary of State was in Washington D.C. attending the national Secretaries of State conference, but now, all of a sudden, she abandoned the conference to rush back home to Oregon.
This scandal has flown under the radar on the national scene, but the new wrinkle lends credence to the thought that the governor is about to resign over the scandal. Why else would the Sec. of State fly back home so suddenly?
[Kate Brown’s] unexpected return from an east-coast conference of secretaries of state comes as Gov. John Kitzhaber is under intense pressure over an influence-peddling scandal involving himself and First Lady Cylvia Hayes.
Kitzhaber and Hayes are the subject of a criminal investigation by the Oregon Department of Justice and the FBI.
Brown was attending the winter conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State in Washington, D.C. It began Tuesday, and is not scheduled to end until Friday. Roth is covering the event, and tweeted this morning that Brown had unexpectedly left.
The Governor is being investigated for secretly giving his then girlfriend (now wife) state contracts that made her rich.