Burke: Who paid for anti-Pepper postcard?

The Hamilton County Board of Elections will hold a hearing at 1 p.m. today on the Pepper-Tye affair. To update the status of the investigation going into the hearing:

Donald Tye Jr. received a wire transfer for $1,980 from a Texas based political consultant working for Republican mayoral candidate Charlie Winburn, according to bank records subpoenaed by the Board of Elections.

At today's hearing, Board of Elections Chairman Timothy M. Burke (also chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party) plans to ask Tye whether those funds were used to pay for a postcard attack against Democratic mayoral candidate David Pepper that went out just before last month's primary election. The wire transfer was Sept. 7; the postcards were postmarked Sept. 10.

If the Winburn campaign paid for the postcard, Burke said, he violated Ohio election law by failing to disclose that on the postcard.

But Winburn said he did no such thing. "If anybody implicates me in this -- your newspaper, Tim Burke, anybody else -- I plan to sue you," Winburn said. "I have not participated, nor had any coordination -- any of that. I can't tell you what this card is all about. I've never seen it. I've never participated in it."

Winburn's consultant, Bethel Nathan, confirmed the wire transfer, but said it did not go for the postcard and did not come out of Winburn campaign funds. "It wasn't campaign money. It came out of my own private expense money."

Nathan said he paid Tye for photographs he took of Winburn for a potential campaign brochure. But Winburn lost the primary and the brochures were never produced. Nathan said that because Winburn never approved the final product, he had to eat the cost himself.

Nathan said Winburn paid him more than $200,000 for consulting, but most of that was for media buys. He said he was paid $12,500 for his professional services, but ended up losing money because of expenses -- on a gamble that Winburn would make it out of the primary.

Nathan also disclaimed any knowledge of the postcard, and said he would have tried to kill it if he had known about it. He said the postcard's message -- that Pepper was not a Democrat -- was contradictory to Winburn's strategy of trying to paint Pepper as a liberal in an effort to shore up Winburn's Republican base.