With its chairman and treasurer recently charged with being a spectator at an illegal cockfight, the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission PAC has been ordered to dissolve following “extensive violations of Oklahoma’s campaign finance laws,” the state Ethics Commission announced Wednesday.
McIntosh County District Attorney Carol Iski charged PAC Chairman Anthony DeVore and Treasurer Blake Pearce with the misdemeanor count Sept. 8, three months after an animal rights organization surreptitiously recorded video of the two men at cockfights.
“I have no comment,” DeVore told NonDoc on Thursday. “You can contact my attorney, Billy Coyle.”
Asked about the case, Coyle said “my client maintains his innocence.”
“I will say this doesn’t come from a law enforcement investigation. Mr. DeVore was never interviewed or asked by officers to be interviewed. It comes from some type of camera, some type of hidden camera, [we] don’t know,” Coyle said. “So I just think that these — whatever animal rights people are behind it — there’s a fine line by the Constitution and the protection of your privacy, and these people are using whatever tactics they can in the name of some animal protection. We maintain our innocence, and we’ll fight our case in court. But make no doubt about it, Mr. DeVore has never had his opportunity to give his side of the story prior to a charge being filed.”
Asked if his client denies that he is pictured in the video released by Animal Wellness Action, Coyle said, “It looks like him.”
“But I don’t know. I guess it looks like him. Someone who resembles him looks like him,” Coyle said. “Do they have someone who is going to come and testify? I guess that’s what we’re going to argue about.”
Iski’s office charged Pearce under a different spelling of his last name — “Pierce” — an apparent error that meant not even Coyle knew his other client faced the same misdemeanor count. Pearce signed the settlement (embedded below), but he did not respond to a request for comment prior to the publication of this article.
The Gamefowl Commission PAC, whose stated goal is “to support candidates who support reform of gamefowl laws and oppose candidates who oppose reform of gamefowl laws,” cannot form a new “affiliated PAC” for at least two years as terms of its settlement agreement with the Ethics Commission. The Ethics Commission also required the PAC to pay $455 on Oct. 1 and $415 every month thereafter until September 2027, totaling $10,000 in accumulative fines.
“This agreement reflects the Commission’s strong commitment to accountability and transparency in Oklahoma’s campaign finance system. These violations were not mere oversights — they were blatant breaches of the law that undermine public trust in the fairness of Oklahoma’s elections,” said Lee Anne Bruce Boone, executive director of the Ethics Commission. “By admitting violations and accepting both financial and structural consequences, the respondents are being held responsible with real and lasting repercussions. The public can be assured that the Commission takes seriously its duty to hold political committees accountable and that campaign finance rules are enforced consistently and fairly.”
According to a press release from the Ethics Commission, the PAC admitted to nine serious and repeated violations of the state’s ethics rules:
- “Accepting anonymous contributions far in excess of the legal limit,” a violation of Rules 2.17 and 2.20;
- “Taking contributions above the maximum allowed by law,” a violation of Rule 2.33;
- “Failing to collect and report required contributor information, denying voters the transparency they are entitled to,” a violation of Rule 2.17;
- “Accepting prohibited corporate contributions,” a violation of Rule 2.23;
- “Concealing money by failing to fully report contributions and expenditures,” a violation of Rule 2.105;
- “Spending funds outside the PAC’s stated purpose,” a violation of Rule 2.41;
- “Using cash withdrawals to make political expenditures,” a violation of Rules 2.95 and 2.39; and
- “Failing to maintain accurate committee records as required by law,” a violation of Rule 2.83.
The Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission PAC has been quiet in its political donations for quite some time, at least according to the PAC’s self-reports to the Ethics Commission. The PAC has not recorded making any contributions to candidate committees, political parties or other PACs since the fourth quarter of 2023, when it listed $1,750 in contributions to various candidate committees. Reported incoming funds and in-kind contributions dried up about the same time — the last time the PAC recorded a positive “funds received” figure was the third quarter of 2023. As of its most recent filing, the PAC had a negative balance of $10,487.39, the same balance it had reported since the second quarter of 2024.
The PAC’s reports filed with the Ethics Commission in 2022 and 2023 show significantly more political activity, including a slate of apparent discrepancies. Beyond numerous reported donations that did not include a contributor name or address, 2022 filings listed more than $64,000 in contributions from the PAC to itself.
In a meeting of the Ethics Commission on Sept. 11, commissioners voted to authorize Bruce Boone to submit a counteroffer settlement to the PAC. At the time, Bruce Boone said she did not know whether the settlement would be finalized before the commission’s next scheduled meeting Oct. 9. The settlement ended up being finalized less than a week later. The PAC has been under investigation since Nov. 2024 when the Ethics Commission “determined there was reasonable cause to believe violations of Rule 2 may have occurred and authorized a formal investigation.”
The settlement agreement notes that, after the respondents complete the agreement’s terms, they will be “fully and finally released from liability under the Ethics Rules,” but not “claims that cannot be waived by law.”
“This agreement does not encompass any entity other than the respondent(s) and the Ethics Commission,” Bruce Boone elaborated via email. “As such, the commission has no authority to settle any such claims that might exist.”
District attorneys hear cockfighting presentation
This summer, Pearce and DeVore came under scrutiny when Animal Wellness Action advocate Kevin Chambers recorded and released video appearing to show the two men attending illegal cockfights in Oklahoma.
On Thursday, one day after the Ethics Commission settlement was announced, Chambers delivered a presentation at an Oklahoma District Attorneys Council meeting, encouraging the body of elected officials to support the Fight Act proposed in Congress and enforce existing criminal laws against cockfighting in the state.
“They’ve spent the last three years up at the Oklahoma State Capitol with me telling everybody that they are not cockfights, but two months ago I caught them at a cockfight. (…) They don’t have a big reputation for being law-abiding,” Chambers said of Pearce and DeVore before referencing 2023 polling on the topic. “The opinion on cockfighting is interesting. It’s one of the few bipartisan issues that Oklahomans agree on. (…) Across Oklahoma in general, 87 percent of people favor keeping cockfighting as a felony in the state. Urban, rural, men, women, it’s completely popular. People who go after cockfighters are also popular.”
Chambers told about two dozen assembled district attorneys that he attended his first cockfight in Chickasha after a fellow Oklahoma State University student invited him in 1975.
“These are pretty barbaric events, and the thing that gets me is I’ve never been to a cockfight where there were not children there,” Chambers said. “They take their children to these cockfights and teach them to disrespect the law and desensitize them to this sort of cruelty, and that has implications for crimes in your communities.”
Chambers appeared on the meeting agenda as the guest of Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler, who suggested that cockfighting rings have become more connected to Mexican drug cartels. Attorney General Gentner Drummond spoke up quickly to discuss his prosecution of illegal marijuana grows in Oklahoma.
“We have not seen chicken fighting at the cartel grows we have shut down, so we have not seen a correlation,” Drummond said.
Asked about cockfighting prior to the start of Thursday’s meeting, Drummond told NonDoc that, “It’s against the law.”
Asked if Oklahoma prosecutors have been doing enough to enforce the criminal penalties against cockfighting, Drummond was less sure.
“I haven’t taken the time to look into that area yet,” he said. “I mean, I trust these [district attorneys] to do the right thing.”
(Update: This article was updated at 7:55 a.m. Friday, Sept. 19, to include reference to District Attorney Carol Iski filing a misdemeanor charge against Gamefowl Commission PAC Treasurer Blake Pearce, albeit under a different spelling of his last name.)
Read the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission PAC settlement
