Ask her attorney, and Sharon Barnes Sutton was the victim here.
The former DeKalb County commissioner may be facing extortion and bribery charges, Natasha Silas told a federal jury Wednesday morning, but she’s guilty only of misplaced trust and miscommunication — a woman targeted by federal investigators who, unable to pin anything else on her, gave a one-time confidant reason to have “a vested interest in her downfall.”
That money she took?
Not extorted, not anything to do with a county contract, but a contribution to an “informal legal defense fund,” the defense attorney said.
“It was not a bribe,” Silas said. “Not to her.”
As Barnes Sutton’s long-awaited trial got underway on the 19th floor of the Richard B. Russell Federal Building in downtown Atlanta, Silas used her opening statement to lay out the case she intends to make for her client. Prosecutors from the Department of Justice’s public integrity unit outlined their strategy as well.
Unsurprisingly, they told very different versions of the same tale.
As previously documented in Barnes Sutton’s indictment and subsequent court filings, prosecutors contended that the former commissioner confronted Reginald Veasley, a sewer contractor, following a 2014 meeting. She passed him a note that said “500” and uttered the words “a month.”
Veasley’s relatively new solo venture, Environmental Consortium LLC, had recently gotten a county contract worth $1.8 million, if extended over its full four-year term. This was understood to be pay-for-play demand, an exchange that would guarantee the contract — and all that money — didn’t suddenly land in another company’s lap.
“It was a life-changing event for my family,” Veasley said of the contract.
The state’s first witness Wednesday, Veasley admitted to paying Barnes Sutton a total of $1,000 before the feds stepped in.
“This wasn’t a mistake,” prosecutor Jordan Dickson said in his opening statement. “It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a misunderstanding.”
As the former commissioner — who left office after losing a re-election bid in 2016 — sat silently in a navy blue sweater, Silas and the defense argued otherwise.
There was no mention of a stroke that Barnes Sutton suffered in 2012 allegedly impairing her judgment, which attorneys had hinted at in previous court filings. But Silas did say there was confusion at play.
And she contended that her client was inappropriately targeted by the FBI, which even by 2014 had been sniffing around the DeKalb government for years.
Silas said the feds had another county contractor wear a wire and try to offer Barnes Sutton money for contracts in 2012. The commissioner didn’t bite. Prosecutors had purportedly already tapped her phone as well.
“Instead of accepting the results of their corruption test,” Silas said, “they dug in further, like a dog with a bone.”
In early 2014, Silas said, investigators turned longtime county staffer Morris Williams into an informant by confronting him with information about his “cocaine habit.” The goal was to target Barnes Sutton specifically, according to a proffer agreement that Silas shared during her opening statement.
Recorded conversations between Williams, Barnes Sutton and Veasley — garnered by Williams wearing a wire — form the heart of the prosecution’s case against the ex-commissioner.
The defense did not deny that Barnes Sutton solicited money from Veasley. But Silas suggested the commissioner was asking for money for a legal defense fund, cash needed to pay lawyers helping her handle separate allegations surrounding the use of her county purchasing card.
When Veasley appeared in a county breakroom following that May 2014 commission meeting, she assumed Williams had sent him and he knew what the situation was. She passed Veasley a note “because she was paranoid about people knowing she was in trouble,” Silas said.
Wednesday was the first day of proceedings in Barnes Sutton’s trial, which could last as long as two weeks.
