Sedgwick County Commission formally asks O’Donnell to resign

The Sedgwick County Commission passed a resolution Wednesday censuring Commissioner Michael O’Donnell and formally requesting his resignation.

And if O’Donnell wins re-election next week, he should decline to serve that term, the resolution said.

O’Donnell said after the commission meeting that he has no plans to step down at this time.

O’Donnell is the second Wichita area official to be censured by his colleagues this week. On Tuesday, the Wichita City Council censured south-side council member James Clendenin.

Both Republican officeholders, along with state Rep. Michael Capps, have been tied to a smear video campaign that falsely accused Mayor Brandon Whipple of sexual harassment and a cover-up that blamed Sedgwick County GOP Chair Dalton Glasscock for the video.

The plot to blame Glasscock was revealed Friday, when a secret recording was released of a November 2019 meeting of the three men where they schemed how to get away with it. The recording offered detailed evidence of plotting by O’Donnell, Capps and Clendenin to falsely accuse Glasscock of masterminding the project in an attempt to save their own political careers.

“Like I’ve always learned in politics, it’s always avoid the truth at all expense, right? And just go on the attack,” O’Donnell is heard saying in the recording.

He also compared their mission to that of Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion extremist who assassinated Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in 2009 during a Sunday morning service at Reformation Lutheran Church where Tiller was serving as an usher.

The statements were on a secret recording made by Matthew Colborn, hired to produce a video smearing Whipple in his campaign to unseat former Mayor Jeff Longwell. Colborn’s attorney, Michael Schultz, released the audio to media Friday.

Wichita Eagle reporting had already connected all three officeholders to the smear campaign, but they had consistently downplayed their roles. When the audio recording surfaced, the reaction from Wichita-area officials was swift.

The Sedgwick County Republican Party and Republican U.S. Rep. Ron Estes called on the three officials to resign, along with each of the four county commissioners. But none of the trio of Wichita Republican officeholders has stepped down.

The three officials — O’Donnell, Clendenin and Capps — are currently embroiled in a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Whipple and under investigation by District Attorney Marc Bennett, who will decide whether their actions constitute grounds for legal action seeking to oust them from office.

The attack ad lifted accusations from a Kansas City Star/Wichita Eagle story about alleged sexual harassment of interns by Republican senators at the Kansas Capitol, and wrongly transferred those accusations to Whipple, a House Democrat.

The ad, launched from behind the shield of an anonymous New Mexico shell company, was quickly proven false by Eagle reporting and Whipple filed his civil lawsuit to find out who was behind it.

Sedgwick County Commissioner Jim Howell read the resolution, saying O’Donnell’s involvement “displays a lack of honesty and integrity.”

“The content of the audio recording could lead to a reasonable conclusion that this attempt to shift blame was dishonest and that the other individuals sought to be blamed were not involved in the production of the negative campaign video,” Howell said.

“To try to blame an innocent man for such a disgusting act is despicable,” Commissioner Lacey Cruse said.

“The only way out of this is to resign, is to admit what you did and ask for forgiveness. That is your only way out,” Cruse said to O’Donnell, who sits to the immediate right of Cruse on the Commission bench.

O’Donnell, who made his first public statement Wednesday from the bench, continued to deny his involvement in the video, saying his only involvement was raising money.

“I raised money for billboards, and that money was spent on this video,” he said.

He admitted to the cover-up and called it “stupid” and “wrong.”

“Following the video’s production and release, I did make serious errors in judgment by partaking in an effort to cover up who actually produced the video, and shifting the blame to those who had nothing to do with it,” O’Donnell said.

“There is no excuse for my actions, and no excuses are going to be given here today,” he said.

O’Donnell said what he did was “a serious lapse in judgment.”

“2020 has been a bad year for me, for all of us, for our community. I think I’ve changed a lot since that video happened. I lost my father in February, and he’s not here for me to talk to and get counsel. But that is not an excuse for my actions, because they were wrong.”

O’Donnell apologized to the entire commission and to the people of his district, which includes parts of south Wichita, Haysville and Clearwater. But he did not offer his resignation.

“To my constituents, my actions in the aftermath of this video were terrible,” he said. “I apologize for my actions. You, the citizens of District 2, deserve better, and I will be better.”

The commission voted 4-0, with O’Donnell abstaining.

O’Donnell said the only way he will resign is if he is directly linked to the creation of the anti-Whipple smear video.

“If it comes to light that I was responsible for the script or production or initiation of that project, I will absolutely do it (resign),” he told The Eagle on Wednesday.

This story was originally published October 28, 2020 at 10:29 AM.