A Pastor’s True Calling

The issue is now surfacing again. Families of DuMond's victims are vowing to campaign against Huckabee. Last week in Iowa, a mysterious anti-Huckabee group calling itself Iowans for Some Semblance of Christian Decency slipped anti-Huckabee fliers under the doors of hotel rooms where reporters were staying. The fliers cited Huckabee's "arm twisting" in the DuMond case and declared TRUE JUSTICE ELUDES MR. HUCKABEE.

Talking his way out of predicaments like these may turn out to be the least of Huckabee's worries. The moralist candidate who has made character the foundation of his campaign is having a far harder time explaining away persistent questions about his alleged ethics lapses as governor. During his time in the statehouse, Huckabee faced 16 ethics complaints that resulted in $1,000 in fines for failing to properly report outside income and payments from his campaign fund. He was also investigated—but never admonished—for using state aircraft for personal and political travel.

But no complaint was more controversial than his involvement with a secretive nonprofit group called Action America. In 1994, a group of Huckabee supporters set up Action America to help the new lieutenant governor advance his political career. At the time, Huckabee was broke. He'd spent everything he had on his failed Senate race. His new job paid just $24,000 a year. During Huckabee's time as lieutenant governor, the group raised $119,916. Of that, according to tax returns, $71,500 was paid directly to Huckabee as payment for speeches and traveling expenses. When the press discovered the fund, Huckabee refused to disclose the names of Action America's donors—oddly claiming at the time that doing so would somehow violate federal law.

"It's not like there was something nefarious going on," Huckabee tells NEWSWEEK. "It was an upfront, legitimate effort to travel around and drive up interest in politics." In fact, there was a bit more to it than that. Two of Action America's directors, J. J. Vigneault and Greg Graves—both former Huckabee political consultants—tell NEWSWEEK that the group was substantially funded by one source: R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco giant. Vigneault and Graves—who were both also R.J. Reynolds consultants—say the company hoped to use Huckabee's political skills to drum up grass-roots opposition to the national health-care plan then being pushed by First Lady Hillary Clinton. The idea was that Huckabee would fly around the country persuading evangelicals to come out against the Clinton proposal, which included a cigarette tax. The two Action directors say Reynolds pitched in $40,000, making it the fund's largest contributor. Vigneault, a Little Rock lobbyist who served as one of Huckabee's chief strategists, says the idea for the group was hatched in the Admirals Club of the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, where Huckabee had mentioned his financial troubles to Vigneault. Vigneault says the group was incorporated in Texas because "we didn't want anybody to find out about it."

Huckabee tells NEWSWEEK that there was nothing illegal about Action America and that he reported the income on his disclosure forms. "I fully complied with every bit of the law," he says. He insists he had "no idea" where the funds came from. "I don't even know who all the donors were." He specifically says he did not know anything about the tobacco money. Yet Vigneault says some of the details of the fund were worked out at a meeting with a Reynolds executive that took place inside Huckabee's Little Rock apartment: "Hell, Huckabee had some ideas. He thought we needed to play up that this was the first step to socialized medicine." Comically, Vigneault says Huckabee made the tobacco exec step outside to have a smoke. (R.J. Reynolds did not return calls seeking comment.)

Huckabee, choosing his words with Clintonian precision, says he doesn't remember a thing about the alleged get-together in his apartment: "I don't recall those meetings. I'm not saying they never happened. But I don't have any recollection of them," he tells NEWSWEEK. "If they can show me pictures of me there, that might help." He insists that none of the speeches funded by Action America had anything to do with tobacco. "They sure didn't get anything out of me," he says. Graves, who was president of Action America, says he was "incredulous" to hear that Huckabee denied knowing where the money came from. "I don't know how he could have not known," he says.