A district judge has awarded the chairman of a Republican-leaning political action committee about $86,000 in legal fees after successfully fighting a subpoena issued to him as part of a broad campaign finance investigation.
District Judge Teresa Watson ordered the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission this week to pay $85,785 to David Matthew Billinglsey, chair of the Lift Up PAC, after a judge refused to allow the state ethics commission to enforce a subpoena against him.
An award that size represents about 10% of the agency’s total budget of $863,869 for fiscal year 2025, including $560,050 in state general funds.
Mark Skoglund, executive director of the ethics commission, could not be reached for comment by email early Tuesday afternoon.
Last summer, Watson ruled that the state law used as the basis for enforcing the subpoena against Billingsley was unconstitutionally vague. The case is now on appeal.
Ethics officials had been looking at the Lift Up PAC as part of a broad investigation into whether political action committees allegedly gave money to Republican county parties that was in turn relayed to the state Republican Party to skirt campaign finance limits.
The ethics commission has been seeking information about contributions from the Republican State Leadership Committee in Washington, D.C., to the Lift Up PAC and the Right Way Kansas PAC during the 2020 elections.
The investigation has focused on whether there was a violation of a state law barring someone from making a campaign contribution in the name of another. The law also prohibits someone from knowingly taking a contribution made in the name of another.
Watson rejected the commission’s request to enforce the subpoena under a 2016 law intended to discourage lawsuits aimed at limiting free speech on matters of public interest.
Billingsley had requested about $300,000 in attorney fees and sanctions, accusing the ethics commission of carrying out a broad investigation of campaign finance in public view, playing favorites with Democrats and issuing subpoenas that were “staggeringly broad.”
Watson denied the request for sanctions, saying that the award of attorney fees is likely enough to deter repetition of the conduct, at least pending the outcome of any appeal or other emerging precedent from a higher court.
Billingsley, who was just hired as the chief of staff for the new Senate majority leader, had sought $101,335 in attorney fees and $198,482.50 in sanctions.
Watson reduced the request for attorney fees by $13,050, which included about 35 hours of attorney time for work the judge said didn’t have a direct connection to the case.
The hours removed included monitoring ethics commission meetings and communicating with others about those meetings as well as monitoring federal or state litigation involving other persons or entities and communicating with others about that topic.
The judge also subtracted another $2,500 for billing related to a first subpoena that was issued to Billingsley in February 2022 but was not enforced.
Billingsley’s lawyers – Ryan Kriegshauser and Josh Ney – bill out at $375 per hour for legal services and $100 per hour for support staff.
“The novel issues in this case have been litigated against a changing legal landscape with many moving parts, including legislative action and the large number of subpoenas generated by the KGEC as part of its investigation,” Watson wrote.
“Litigation of this case required skill and familiarity with complex areas of the law,” Watson wrote. “Billingsley’s attorneys have demonstrated that they possess the requisite skill.”
Billingsley said the $198,000 requested in sanctions against the ethics commission was the amount of legal fees paid by others in defense of the ethics subpoenas issued to others in 2022 and 2023.
The others were not named in Billingsley’s brief, nor were affidavits or other materials attached to support the amount, according to the court ruling.
Billingsley said that several individuals and entities formed a “joint defense agreement” and combined legal expenses to the extent possible.
Billingsley said any award of sanctions would “be used solely to reimburse political actors for attorneys’ fees they have already paid defending such unconstitutional governmental conduct in the underlying investigation.”
The ethics commission acknowledged that the breadth and depth of its investigation, and the sheer number of subpoenas issued, was unusual, the court ruling said.
But the ethics commission “asserts that there was no reason to believe that Billingsley’s proposed subpoena violated Kansas law or offended constitutional principles.”
Billingsley responded, saying that the investigation was “unprecedented, obviously partisan, and designed to punitively unearth and expose private protected speech among Kansans participating in Republican Party-related activities.”
Watson said the “conduct” at issue in deciding whether to award legal fees is the ethics commission wide-ranging investigation and sweeping subpoenas based upon a campaign finance statute that is unconstitutionally vague as applied.
“In this instance, there was no definitive Kansas case law to suggest that the (ethics commission) course of action, here Billingsley’s subpoena, was based on an unconstitutionally vague statute,” Watson wrote.
