by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

When Diego Morales won the Indiana Republican nomination for Secretary of State back in 2022, I was not there.

Nope. I was about 2,500 miles away, somewhere off the Alaska coast, where Juneau is lovely this time of year, salmon melts are awesome,  and the wi-fi works when it feels like it. The 2022 state convention picked Morales over a sitting Secretary of State, Holli Sullivan.  A majority were mad a t then Governor Eric Holcomb over COVID, so they took it out on Sullivan.   And I learned about it the way you learn about anything on a cruise ship — late, on a laggy connection, with a drink in hand, cigar in mouth and the Lovely Mrs. Shabazz getting very annoyed.

Four years later, I’ve spent enough ink on this man to fill the Alaska pipeline. So with delegates heading to Fort Wayne this weekend to decide whether to keep him, allow me a recap.

The case against Morales in 2022 was not a secret. He had been shown the door at the Secretary of State’s office not once but twice — written up for poor performance in 2009, and again in 2011. He campaigned as “U.S. Army veteran Diego Morales,” though the service amounted to three months and 18 days of active duty before a National Guard stint he left as a specialist, never deployed. He bought a $43,000 Toyota RAV4 with campaign money. Records showed he’d voted in Hendricks County in 2018, registered at a Plainfield condo, while claiming a homestead tax deduction on the Marion County house where he actually lived — the kind of residency two-step that, a decade earlier, helped land a sitting Secretary of State named Charlie White a felony conviction and an early exit from this very office. Two women accused him of sexual misconduct, which he denied. He called the 2020 election a “scam,” then told the Washington Post that Joe Biden won fair and square once that became the convenient position. A lot of us political observers figured he’d drawn the worst statewide press since Richard Mourdock.

But, delegates nominated him anyway and voters elected him.

Then he governed.

The years since have been a steady drip. Reporting on office spending and travel. Family members on the payroll. Records showing nearly half a million dollars in raises. A $90,000 payment out of the Securities Restitution Fund — the account that exists to make securities-fraud victims whole — routed to an AI software contractor that happened to be a donor. His own office fumbled the candidate paperwork for this very election cycle, processing declarations of candidacy his deputies weren’t properly authorized to certify and sending hundreds of candidates from both parties scrambling to refile before the deadline — the office that runs elections, tripping over its own election forms. And then the one that finally cracked the dam: a former chief of staff, a noncitizen, registered to vote in Tippecanoe County on a temporary driver’s license issued to people who aren’t citizens. (We broke that one here. Some of you noticed.)

That last item is the one that moved the establishment, because that last item is the one that looked unwinnable in November.

Suddenly everyone found their voice. Sen. Jim Banks and Attorney General Todd Rokita yanked their endorsements and recruited Banks staffer Max Engling, who entered the day before the filing deadline. Treasurer Daniel Elliott went all the way and called on Morales to resign. Reps. Baird, Houchin, Spartz and Yakym fell in behind Engling. The delegate numbers I’ve seen show Morales, under the right circumstances with a path to victory, at least at the convention level.

So, with that said, Morales, to his credit or his stubbornness, won’t go. He says the delegates decide, not the insiders — rich, coming from the guy who became Secretary of State because of the work of the ultimate insider’s insider himself, and everybody walking into that convention hall knows exactly who that is — but he’s right that they decide. About 1,800 of them, Saturday, in Fort Wayne.

So as this thing barrels toward the convention floor, the columnist’s instinct is to reach for the line everyone reaches for: if we only knew then what we know now.

Except we did know. All of it — the firings, the résumé, the RAV4, the allegations, the flip-flop — was on the record before a single 2022 delegate filled out a ballot. None of it was hidden. The party knew, and nominated him, and elected him, and tolerated him, and defended him, right up until the math stopped working.

And it wasn’t only the party. The lobbyists, the PACs, the vendors who do business with that office knew as well as the rest of us — better, probably; they read the room for a living. But saying so out loud carried a price the rest of us don’t pay. You don’t cross the official who signs off on your client’s business and then go looking for the retaliation, the grief and the sorrow that follow. Easier to write the check, smile at the dinner, and wait to see which way the delegates break.

If we only knew then what we know now.

Never mind. We knew. And making matters worse, we still  know. See a couple thousand of you in Ft. Wayne this weekend.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of Indy Politics. He is also an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of Indy Politics.  He is also an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illiniois.