FBI reportedly probing campaign adviser to Brownback, Roberts

A campaign adviser for Gov. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) is reportedly under investigation for alleged influence peddling during his time as Brownback’s chief of staff.

Former GOP state Sen. Dick Kelsey on Thursday urged Brownback to cut all ties with David Kensinger, his former chief of staff and a current adviser to his campaign, saying he had been contacted by the FBI as part of its investigation in his work in state government.

“The FBI called me. The investigation is very real,” Kelsey said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. “It’s not a political thing with them at all. They do not want government that is corrupt. I am confident it’s not finished.”

{mosads}The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that the investigation is broadly focused on “influence-peddling operations in Kansas government,” and that Kensinger’s role in the state’s privatization of its Medicaid program was of particular interest to the FBI.

Kensinger, now a lobbyist and consultant, was the governor’s chief of staff in the early stages of negotiations with three private insurance companies that were eventually contracted to provide Medicaid to hundreds of thousands Kansans. He left the governor’s office two months before contracts were signed with the companies.

Kelsey says Kensinger was financially compensated by all three companies, though he offered no proof for the allegations.

Kelsey has endorsed Brownback’s Democratic opponent, Paul Davis. Brownback’s spokesman dismissed the press conference as a “political sideshow.”

Kensinger remains an adviser to Brownback’s campaign and has also advised Roberts’s reelection bid, receiving a total $8,000 from the senator’s campaign between January and April of this year.

He ran Roberts’s 2008 campaign as well. After winning that race, Roberts called Kensinger “the true Machiavelli of Kansas, David Kensinger, our pitbull without lipstick, whose expertise in this new and very different world of political campaigns is unrivaled.”

Roberts remains one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the battle for the Senate, with recent polling showing him trailing his independent challenger, Greg Orman.