Broun consultant pleads guilty to making false statements Dr. Paul Broun, the Watkinsville physician who served northeast Georgia in Congress for seven years ending last year, improperly used more than $40,000 in public funds to pay a consultant for work done for his campaigns for office, according to information in a guilty plea entered Thursday in federal court by the consultant who got that money. Brett O’Donnell, president of Alexandria, Va.-based communications consulting firm O’Donnell & Associates, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Macon late last week to making false statements in connection with work he did for Broun in Broun’s 2012 re-election campaign for the U.S. House seat he first won in a 2007 special election, and in Broun’s unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2013 and 2014. Documents associated with O’Donnell’s plea of guilty, in which Broun is identified as “Congressman A” read, in part, “(d)espite the substantial work O’Donnell...
