Findings from the ethics investigation into former Montana Senate President, Sen. Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, are expected to be teed up within days for a debate next week on the Senate floor.
The 36-page document, crafted by two Republicans and two Democrats, sums up three days of testimony by government employees familiar with the $170,100 contract Ellsworth awarded to a long-time business associate.
If the Senate finds that Ellsworth violated state disclosure law, the consequences could include censure or even, with a two-thirds majority vote, expulsion from the Senate.
The issue before the four-member Senate Ethics Committee is whether Ellsworth should have disclosed his relationship with contractor Bryce Eggleston. The two had done business together for 20 years, according to testimony.
Eggleston was contracted to track several Republican bills intended to limit the autonomy of Montana courts. After the bills became law, Eggleston was to observe and report on how state agencies put the new laws into practice. The contractor in January declined the work as the investigation into the transaction drew media attention.
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Ethics committee starts investigation into former state Senate president
A Senate Ethics Committee hearing concerning state Sen. Jason Ellsworth’s relationship with a government contractor launched with a debate over what witnesses the former Montana Senate president could use in his defense. A $170,100 contract for services is at the heart of the matter.
Before finalizing edits Wednesday, the committee spent three days selecting which findings to include and which to leave out. One piece of testimony that didn’t make the cut concerned Ellsworth and Eggleston’s roles in a magazine subscription business that billed people for magazines they didn’t want, while not disclosing to would-be customers that no purchase was required to enroll in a sweepstakes contest intended to promote sales. In 2009, Ellsworth reached a $600,000 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the magazine sales.
Ellsworth was the owner of Time 2 Read, the company behind the sales. Eggleston was an employee. Democrats on the Ethics Committee, particularly Sen. Laura Smith, D-Helena, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, said digging deeply into magazine matter, now more than 15 years old, risked the impartiality of the findings. Lawmakers, Smith said, were to determine whether Ellsworth had a relationship that should have been disclosed when the contract was awarded in December 2024, not relitigate a matter that took place in 2008.
The committee also decided against presenting the assessment of Legislative Auditor Angus Maciver, who spelled out his opinion of the Ellsworth case in a memo. The concern was that Maciver’s conclusion wasn’t a ruling and could be misconstrued as a legal conclusion.
“I’ve been very clear that I do not want this document to include legal conclusions,” Smith said. “I don’t want this document to include opinions or assumptions. We have spent days trying to make sure that that is true and that we as a committee can sign on to a document that’s factually accurate.”
Separate from the Ethics Commission investigation, the state Department of Justice is investigating whether Ellsworth committed official misconduct related to how the contract was awarded to Eggleston.
Investigators from the Legislative Audit Division determined that the work Ellsworth awarded to Eggleston should have gone out to bid, and that the work was inappropriately split into two contracts for the purpose of avoiding the $100,000 threshold at which bidding would have been required.
Eggleston was to be fully compensated before he started working on a job that he said, in a recorded interview with Ellsworth’s attorney, he expected to last more than a year.
To make the contracts legal, the Department of Administration merged the two agreements and awarded the work under a “sole source” classification that doesn’t require bidding. Procurement staff indicated that because Ellsworth and Eggleston signed the contracts before presenting them to the state, the agreement couldn’t be voided. That final contract is the one Eggleston declined in January.
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