Ducey's re-election campaign reveals true source of $500,000 donation

PHOENIX — Gov. Doug Ducey’s re-election campaign is quietly conceding that a $500,000 donation listed as coming from a newly formed company actually came from a billionaire who works for a company that owns more than two dozen auto dealerships in the state.

Capitol Media Services discovered that the Ducey Victory Fund on Wednesday retroactively amended the campaign finance report it filed on July 16 to remove the name of Blue Magnolia from the donation. The report now says the money came from Larry Van Tuyl, who runs the Berkshire Hathaway Automotive Group after he sold his 28 dealerships to the firm in 2014.

That amended filing came just two days after the Attorney General’s Office received and began investigating a complaint from the Campaign Legal Center that the committee set up to help the governor get a second four-year term violated laws making it illegal to donate money to a campaign in the name of someone else.

But Brendan Fischer, director of the center’s federal reform program, said the fact that the disclosure now has been corrected and the true source of the dollars is now public should not end the probe.

“It’s not enough that a half-million-dollar contribution is reattributed once the secret donor gets caught,” he said. “It’s important that Arizona authorities send a message that this kind of conduct is impermissible.”

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And Fischer does not think the probe should end with how it was actually Van Tuyl who put the money into Ducey’s campaign in May through the limited liability company that had been formed in Delaware just two weeks earlier. He wants Attorney General Mark Brnovich to find out what the governor and his campaign staff knew and when they knew it.

“The public has a right to know whether the governor knew about the true source,” Fischer said.

He said the reports available to the public as of Election Day continued to list Blue Magnolia as the donor of the $500,000.

“The governor may have known where this money was coming from,” Fischer said. “But the public did not.”

Ducey has refused to answer what he knew about the $500,000 donation. Nor would he say whether he even questioned getting a check that large from a limited liability company that did not exist two weeks earlier and, according to the complaint, had no visible assets or cash.