Emails show that Delaware Lieutenant Governor Bethany Hall-Long's staff was busy dealing with campaign matters during her business hours

DOVER, Delaware — Staff in Lieutenant Governor Bethany Hall-Long's office have been in regular contact with her husband and others involved in her campaign for Delaware governor over the past year, helping to spend campaign funds during office hours, according to emails obtained by The Associated Press.

The video in the player above is from an earlier report.

The emails, made available through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that Hall-Long asked her office staff, who worked with her husband, for help with matters that had little to no relevance to her role as lieutenant governor, including renewing her memberships in various women's groups and making donations to community groups. Some of these expenses were made with campaign funds.

Delaware law prohibits state employees from engaging in political activity during work hours. As an elected official, Hall-Long is exempt from this rule, but her office staff is not.

Officials handling communications related to Hall-Long's campaign included Matthew Dougherty, director of operations in the lieutenant governor's office. Dougherty recently took a leave of absence to work as Hall-Long's campaign manager. The move comes after the latest in a series of shakeups in Hall-Long's struggling campaign, when two senior staffers left amid a campaign finance audit commissioned by the state Board of Elections.

“Bethany has asked you to send a check for $300 to the address below for an upcoming community event,” Dougherty wrote to Hall-Long's husband, Dana Long, during business hours on a Wednesday afternoon last August. Hall-Long's scheduler and police coordinator Nicole Algarin was copied on the email.

“Hi Dana, they just called about this,” Dougherty wrote in a follow-up email two weeks later. “Could you mail the check?”

Dougherty sent Long a second reminder a week later, “according to our text message conversation.” Long responded the next day and said the check was included in the email. A campaign finance report shows $300 was transferred from Hall-Long's campaign account to Ali Abdul-Aleem of Dover for a “Community Unity Family Day.”

Hall-Long's office staff and employees of the state Behavioral Health Consortium, which she chairs, also worked together to secure her appearance last October in the annual Sea Witch Costume Parade in Rehoboth Beach. Algarin then sent an email during business hours with the parade information to Brandon Cox, Hall-Long's campaign manager at the time.

Photos from the event show Hall-Long in the parade with no indication that she is representing the Lieutenant Governor's Office or the Behavioral Health Consortium. Instead, she is marching in front of a banner that reads “Bethany Hall-Long, Democrat for Governor.”

According to emails, Dana Long also worked with Dougherty during business hours to arrange trips for Hall-Long to Nashville and San Antonio last year. It is unclear whether those trips were for personal or work reasons.

Dougherty told Long in an email that he would like to book a luxury hotel in San Antonio using “BHL's credit card,” but Long responded that he had not yet decided which hotel “we will stay at.”

Hall-Long's campaign finance reports and expenses reported by the lieutenant governor's office do not list travel-related expenses for these dates. Hall-Long also did not report gifts or honoraria on her financial disclosure form for public officials.

Hall-Long did not immediately respond to an email Wednesday seeking information about those trips.

Hall-Long, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, has been under intense scrutiny since September, when she abruptly announced the postponement of a campaign rally with Democratic Governor John Carney scheduled for the next day, citing a need to “take care of a personal, private matter.”

In reality, Hall-Long's campaign was in disarray after people tasked with managing the campaign discovered major discrepancies while reviewing several years of financial reports. The scandal led to the resignations of her campaign manager, her chief fundraiser and her campaign treasurer, who had replaced Dana Long as treasurer just five months earlier.

A forensic investigation released last month by the Board of Elections found that between January 2016 and December 2023, Dana Long wrote 112 checks from his wife's campaign account to himself or cash, and one check to his wife. The checks totaled just under $300,000 and should have been reported as campaign expenses, the investigation found. Instead, 109 checks were never reported in initial financial reports, and the other four, payable to Dana Long, were reported as being made out to someone else, the investigation found.

Hall-Long has claimed that the campaign finance irregularities were merely “accounting errors” related to loans she made to her campaign but failed to report. Matt Meyer, New Castle County Executive and her main rival for the Democratic nomination, has called for a federal investigation into Hall-Long's campaign finances.