District Attorney Wright Barksdale spoke in measured words and was hesitant to criticize the Georgia Bureau during an interview earlier this week with The Baldwin Bulletin.
This is understandable, as it’s obviously important for a district attorney in Georgia to have a good working relationship with the GBI.
At the same time, Barksdale said he still doesn’t understand why the recent GBI investigation, the one involving the county government’s finances, never involved the agency’s Public Corruption Unit and/or its Financial Investigations Units. There was no deep dive into financial records. Instead, the investigation consisted of a handful of relatively brief interviews conducted by GBI field agents. Interviewed were current and former county commissioners, current Interim County Manager Paul Van Haute, former county manager Carlos Tobar, former chief financial officer Dawn Hudson, the auditor from the recent TSPLOST audit, as well as County Engineer Brian Wood and Brad Roberts, owner of Roberts Lane Management.
Barksdale has a copy of the investigation in his office. It’s roughly 50 pages and fits easily into a smaller three-ring binder. It looks more like a college thesis paper.
At this point, Barksdale doesn’t have a lot of options. He emailed one of his contacts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and eventually had a phone conversation with someone from the FBI. However, that was several weeks ago, and that’s been it.
“What I want the public to understand is that (a district attorney’s office doesn’t) have the authority to investigate crime. We rely 100 percent on our law enforcement partners, whether that’s local, state or federal,” Barksdale said. “A lot of people view the district attorney’s office and law enforcement as one, and that’s just not the case.”
Barksdale added that “the people of Baldwin County deserve answers.” Barksdale then was asked if it’s possible for someone to be really bad with money without being crooked.
“Yeah, I’d say so. If that was the case, you could fill up the courthouse with people like that,” he said. “That’s where we’re trying to get to. My goal is to get to the point where we can tell the public ‘yes, this was criminal. Or, no, this wasn’t criminal.’” In the meantime, all that Barksdale can really do is wait for a call back from the FBI.