After putting a lot of time and resources into prosecuting Jason Ellsworth the guilty verdict has been thrown out. Why? Because accidents happen.
The guilty verdict in the official misconduct case against former Senate President Jason Ellsworth has been thrown out following revelations that jurors were exposed to sealed exhibits concerning communications with a potential key witness.
Lewis and Clark County District Judge Christopher Abbott said in a Wednesday court hearing that he learned Wednesday morning that jurors deliberating in the misdemeanor trial were inadvertently given exhibits by court staff regarding the scheduling of potential key witness Bryce Eggleston.
…
“The state does believe that there should be a new trial,” said Dan Guzynski, an assistant Montana attorney general, speaking at a mistrial hearing Wednesday. “I also want to make a brief comment that everybody makes mistakes, and this whole process, and what we’re all involved in, is subject to the human condition.”
Does the “human condition” that Montanans are subjected to, via actions taken with their tax dollars, mean we have to pay for how retarded people can be? I guess so.
For Jason Ellsworth the tossing out of his guilty verdict is an unexpected gift because his evasion of the bidding process when awarding a lucrative contract to his buddy was pretty obvious. I also find it interesting that the work that would have been done by his buddy was tracking legislative bills “curtailing the powers of Montana courts“:
Eggleston is Ellsworth’s longtime friend and former employee, who in 2024 pitched the senator on tracking the state’s progress implementing 27 legislative bills created by lawmakers with the purpose of curtailing the powers of Montana courts. Ellsworth signed two contracts totaling $170,000 for the proposed services on Dec. 26, 2024.
The work was to be performed by Agile Analytics, a then newly formed company for which Eggleston was the registered agent. Prosecutors allege that Ellsworth circumvented competitive bidding requirements and signed the contracts without a required review by state procurement agents.
Eggleston informed the Legislature in early 2025 that Agile was no longer interested in the work after Ellsworth’s handling of the agreements drew public attention.
While this effort blew up in Ellsworth’s face, holding this retarded state legislator accountable will now have to start over at square one. How embarrassing.
Speaking of embarrassing legislators who are so cognitively deficient they can’t even press the right button on a critical vote, who remembers what Tom Jacobson did 13 years ago with Medicaid expansion in Montana?
Yep, retarded Tom was so retarded that even the Washington Post had to marvel at his cataclysmic mistake:
Some states have declined to expand Medicaid because they oppose Obamacare. Others worry about the financial burden of expanding the entitlement. But there appears to be only one state where the Medicaid expansion failed due to a Democratic legislator accidentally voting against it.
Congratulations, Montana.
“We’re tremendously sorry about what happened,” Minority Leader Chuck Hunter, a Democrat, said of the mistaken vote. “Montanans are the losers in this outcome.”
The reporter continues with how unbelievable this idiocy appeared to be:
When I first read about this in a local Montana paper, it sounded unbelievable. How did a legislator get the vote wrong? And, if the vote was a mistake, was there some mechanism to change it? This was, after all, a vote deciding whether 70,000 Montanans would gain health coverage — and whether the state would massively expand an entitlement program.
So I started making some phone calls to Montana. Turns out everybody knew about this mistaken vote — and that the story was even more complex than I had thought.
The complexity about how legislative sausage is made doesn’t change the fact that, at the critical moment, Tom Jacobson fucked up so significantly, tens of thousands of regular Montanans were impacted. Impressive.
Nothing I’ve seen from local government since this vote has given me confidence that cognition deficiencies aren’t a continued threat. From police investigations to cleaning up homeless camps, when local government gets involved, everything just seems to get dumber and more expensive.
If you’d like to help me offset the cost of identifying cognition deficiencies in local government, which includes loss of paid work from the lawfare blowback, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. The recent $20 dollar donation I received, for example, is MUCH appreciated.
Thanks for reading!