Drummond gets to work as the AG of Stitt and Walters’ nightmares

Last Updated on February 5, 2023, 8:46 AM | Published: February 5, 2023

When an Oklahoma politician takes efforts to fulfill campaign promises early in their term and truly does the work, it makes headlines. Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma’s 20th attorney general, deserves the attention.

Watch closely, Oklahomans – this is what governing looks like.  

In his first three weeks in office, Drummond announced he would investigate the state’s misuse of pandemic funds, in which a federal audit determined that Gov. Kevin Stitt and Secretary of Education/State Superintendent of Public Education Ryan Walters misspent Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) funds.

Much of the funding went to private school students, who could receive up to $6,500 in tuition relief, and $1,500 grants were given to low-income families needing education expense relief. 

The audit found that “Oklahoma did not award all of its GEER grant funds in accordance with the CARES Act, federal regulations, department guidance, and GEER grant conditions as discussed in the findings below and the specific sections in this report.”

Walters did a blanket sign-off on all the items the disbursement company, ClassWallet, had listed as purchasable on its website, which is how Oklahomans used CARES Act funds to buy video games, barbecue grills, smartphones and televisions. Following the audit, Stitt directed Attorney General John O’Connor to sue ClassWallet to return the $650,000 Oklahoma paid the Florida company to administrate the GEER funds. 

Now, Drummond has dropped O’Connor’s lawsuit against ClassWallet. It always felt like the lawsuit was face-saving on the part of the governor, an attempt to draw attention from Walters’ and Stitt’s possible illegality in the matter. Now, we have a chance to find out if the governor was trying to pass the buck.

The hits keep coming: on his first day in office, Drummond took back the Epic Charter Schools case. Drummond also reopened the Swadley’s Foggy Bottom Kitchen case, which O’Connor punted to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s office.

During his campaign, Drummond emphasized that it was important that Oklahoma have an attorney general that was not appointed by its governor. We are now starting to learn what that actually means. 

In fact, it feels like Oklahoma did not have an attorney general for about 18 months after Mike Hunter resigned. Instead, we had an attorney general acting as Stitt’s personal lawyer in all his culture war battles, including school vouchers, McGirt v. Oklahoma, COVID-19 vaccines, and the alarming frequency of death row executions, which Drummond is also investigating. 

We’re not used to attorneys general who do what they promise, and yet in the space of less than a month, it looks like Drummond is holding people to account. As Stitt and Walters move fast to privatize Oklahoma’s public schools by causing them to fail, we need someone watching everything they do. As Drummond’s flurry of early activity shows, we always did.

---