Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley’s long-running sex scandal finally came to an end on Monday, when he resigned from office. Bentley, a Republican who was facing almost-certain impeachment and conviction at the hands of his state’s GOP-dominated legislature, reportedly made his move as part of a deal with prosecutors. And adding to the indignity, Bentley was also booked at the Montgomery County jail on two misdemeanor charges relating to campaign finance disclosures. On Monday, Bentley reached a deal where he would resign and never again hold public office, as well as plead guilty to two misdemeanors: using his campaign contributions for his own gain, and failing to report contributions.
Bentley’s departure puts Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey, a fellow Republican, in the governor’s office. Ivey will serve the rest of Bentley’s term, which ends in early 2019, and she may run in her own right next year, when Bentley otherwise would have been term-limited out of office. Bentley’s fall, though, may not just affect next year’s gubernatorial race. It could also spell trouble for Sen. Luther Strange, whom Bentley recently appointed to the U.S. Senate to replace now-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. We have a lot to discuss in this long, sordid saga, so strap in.
We’ll start back in 2014, when Bentley won re-election with ease and looked like he had little to worry about politically in this very red state. But in 2015, First Lady Dianne Bentley shocked Alabama’s political establishment when she filed for divorce after 50 years of marriage, and rumors immediately sprang up that the governor had been carrying on an affair with an influential staffer named Rebekah Mason. Soon after, two Republicans state legislators asked Strange, who at the time was the state’s attorney general, to investigate whether Bentley had used state resources to conceal his relationship with Mason.
The story soon faded from the headlines, but it clawed its way back with a vengeance in March of last year, when some very not-safe-for-work audio recordings of Bentley and Mason that were recorded by Dianne Bentley were leaked. The governor conceded that he was the man on tape, but he denied anything "physical" had happened between him and Mason.
However, the man Bentley had just fired as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Spencer Collier, quickly turned up the heat. Collier claimed that the governor had leased private planes to avoid having to list Mason’s name on the passenger manifests (as he would have to if he used state planes) and alleged that Bentley asked him to lie in a separate, unrelated investigation.
Soon thereafter, the Alabama Ethics Commission announced that it would investigate Bentley, while GOP state Rep. Ed Henry filed articles of impeachment. However, while Bentley had few allies in the legislature, especially after he passed a huge tax hike to close a budget deficit, impeachment proceedings were slow to get off the ground.
Bentley also got some outside help in staving off his judgment day. Just before Election Day last November, Strange sent a letter to the state legislature, asking it to halt its inquiry into Bentley's activities "until I am able to report to you that the necessary related work of my office has been completed." Lawmakers did as Strange asked, explaining in a responsive letter of their own that the attorney general was conducting "a separate investigation of the governor”—a characterization Strange didn’t dispute.
But after Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidency and nominated Sessions to serve as his attorney general, Strange’s calculations seemed to change, since he coveted an appointment to Sessions’ Senate seat—to which Bentley alone held the keys.
Strange understood, though, that accepting an appointment from the guy he was investigating would look bad, so in late December, he belatedly insisted that he never actually said he was investigating the governor, and claimed he had only asked the legislature to suspend its impeachment proceedings because there were "some common players involved" in another investigation.
Strange got his appointment to the Senate, and Bentley named prosecutor Steve Marshall to replace him. Marshall soon acknowledged that the state attorney general’s office had been looking into Bentley all along, and Strange soon admitted that yeah, he was investigating Bentley when, in a perfectly Trumpian display of ethics, he accepted that juicy Senate appointment from him.
Bentley went ahead and scheduled the special election for the final two years of Sessions’ term for November of 2018, and Strange will need to face primary voters come June. A number of fellow Republicans have already complained about the circumstances of Strange’s elevation to the Senate, and in a state that’s seen more than its share of corruption in recent years, Strange could be vulnerable.
But Bentley’s problems remained much more immediate and dire. Last week, the ethics commission found that there was probable cause that Bentley had violated campaign finance and ethics laws by allegedly using state money "to further his personal interest" and referred his case to the Montgomery County district attorney's office. Both of the state’s top legislative leaders publicly called for the governor to resign—and that was all before, Jack Sharman, the special counsel hired by the House Judiciary Committee to oversee its probe of Bentley, released his bombshell report on Friday.
The report not only included page after page of Bentley and Mason’s amorous texts to one another, including the revelation that the governor had once answered the door at his D.C. hotel in his boxers under the mistaken belief that Mason was on the other side. Collier also testified that Bentley had told him to "be prepared to arrest" people who possessed recordings of those explicit conversation with Mason. Heather Hannah, the chief of staff to Dianne Bentley, also testified that the governor had tried to intimidate her to keep the recording under wraps, and sought to punish her for testifying. The report further said that Bentley had used state personnel to try and find the audio. Well, it got found, alright.
On Monday, the first day of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings, everything came to a head. Throughout the day, reports came that Bentley would resign before the week was out. But it was still a surprise when Bentley was booked first. However, Bentley resigned as part of his deal before the end of Monday, and Ivey became governor.
Bentley’s political life is over, but Ivey’s 2018 fate is up in the air. A number of Republicans have been preparing to run for governor next year, but now that Ivey is the incumbent, it may be a while before things come into focus. Alabama elects governors and lieutenant governors separately, so voters may not punish Ivey for Bentley’s sins. Ivey did alienate Republicans after presiding over the collapse of the state's Prepaid Affordable College Tuition program during her tenure as state treasurer. Still, Alabama’s second female governor is reportedly respected in the state capitol, so power players may give her a chance. Bentley’s resignation ends one of the most chaotic and messy chapters in Alabama politics, but for Ivey, Strange, and plenty of other politicians, the 2018 cycle is only beginning.