Tommy Tuberville

This is an opinion column.

The headline has already given away who we’re talking about, but let’s play an imagination game anyway.

Imagine a candidate for higher office promised to give his salary — potentially as much as $1 million over six years — to veterans’ charities.

Would that be bad?

Imagine, also, that the same candidate had already been caught voting in a state where he swears — yes, swears, as in, under oath — that he didn’t live at the time.

If this were a candidate who was new to you, would it leave you with a positive impression? Would you consider the person fit for office or electable? Would you vote for such a person?

Early in a new candidate’s campaign, such revelations would be fatal, but for U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, they’ve been hardly a bump in the road.

When he was running for office in 2020, Tuberville promised to donate his U.S. Senate salary to veterans’ charities, as he mocked his primary opponent, Jeff Sessions, for not having done more.

“I stand with our veterans and I’m going to donate every dime I make when I’m in Washington, D.C., to the veterans of the state of Alabama,” Tuberville said in a video still on his Facebook page. “Folks, they deserve it. They deserve it a lot more than most of us.”

Whether he did remained an open question.

In 2023, Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, concluded that Tuberville had not followed through, under the headline, “Tommy Tuberville pledged to ‘donate every dime’ to veterans. He hasn’t.”

Kessler relied on documents from a veterans’ charity Tuberville founded. The Tommy Tuberville Foundation hosted charity golf tournaments to benefit veterans.

In the story, Tuberville’s office didn’t dispute Kessler’s conclusion, instead blaming an audit of the charity, which his spokesman called his primary vehicle for giving, but not his only means of giving to veterans’ charities.

“The audit was recently completed successfully, and the Foundation is resolving its longstanding problems, resuming its activities, and Coach is resuming his work with the Foundation to help veterans in need,” the spokesman told the Post in July 2023.

Only that doesn’t seem to have happened.

When Tuberville released seven years of his Alabama state tax returns in a challenge to his residency brought by fellow Republicans, he revealed more than he had intended. Much of his financial information was redacted, but his legal team failed to black out a barcode at the top of the forms that contained all those numbers. Anyone with a barcode reader, available as a web or phone app, could read it.

A reporter from the Mobile newspaper Lagniappe did just that.

And what did it reveal?

If Tuberville donated his Senate salary to charity, he didn’t claim it as a deduction on his taxes.

The forms cover four years of Tuberville’s time in office, a period in which he would have made nearly $700,000. In all that time, he claimed a total of only $38,172 in charitable deductions.

Or about a nickel for every dollar he promised.

And that speaks to one possible defense — that he gave but didn’t bother to deduct it. But is a man who took care to write off $38,172 going to forget about $700,000?

Since Lagniappe’s story was published, Tuberville has been asked whether there’s some other explanation. He hasn’t given any straight answers.

Late last month, Tuberville’s office declined to answer questions from AL.com about whether he donated his $174,000 Senate salary to charity.

“Yes, I said that in 2020. My dad was a veteran who served in World War II and died while on active duty at age 53. That’s why I have a foundation that supports veterans,” Tuberville said in an email statement to AL.com in June.

Notice anything he didn’t say?

Tuberville points to his foundation. But the charity’s 990 disclosures to the IRS show that, if Tuberville gave his Senate salary to veterans, he didn’t do it there. And despite what his spokesman told The Post in 2023, Tuberville does not appear to have thrown his support behind the nonprofit that bears his name after the audit was complete.

The treasurer of the Tommy Tuberville Foundation, Chester McKinney, last month told Lagniappe reporter Scott Johnson that the Senator had promised his Senate salary to the nonprofit when McKinney took it over in 2020.

“Coach has to live with that himself,” McKinney told Johnson. “I know what he said and I know what he promised — me and the people heard that. I’m not trying to cover for him.”

The tax records settle something else, too. As Tuberville said when he ran for Senate, he didn’t need the money. Some years since becoming a Senator, his taxable income has approached $1 million, much of it in the form of capital gains.

A U.S. Senator makes $174,000 a year. At the end of a six-year term, that would be more than $1 million. Tuberville promised to give that much to veterans.

And as a campaign promise, this wasn’t a matter of biting off more than he could chew. It’s not like he pledged something he couldn’t deliver, like cutting taxes, only for other people in government to get in the way.

This is something wholly within his control. To fix it, he needs only to cut a check. Or answer for why he hasn’t.

So far, he’s done neither.