In a courtroom in April, defense attorneys and prosecutors gathered to choose a date for the next major step in the embezzlement case against Epic Charter Schools’ co-founders, David Chaney and Ben Harris. After checking their calendars, the attorneys agreed on June 24 for an arraignment, when the two men would enter a plea and the 4-year-old criminal case could move toward trial, court records show.
Two days before the scheduled date, Chaney’s lawyer accused the state of moving too slowly. The next day, Harris’ attorney raised the same issue: by law, their clients should have been arraigned within 30 days.
Their motions created delay, the latest of many in the protracted case.
The state’s massive racketeering case against Epic Charter Schools’ founders has been called the largest embezzlement scheme involving taxpayer money in Oklahoma's history.
With criminal charges in such a historic case now four years and three months old, the delay raises questions about what is taking so long. The upcoming leadership change at the Office of the Attorney General, which is handling the state's prosecution, leaves the outlook for any resolution uncertain.
State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd handed over thousands of pages of forensic audit work papers and investigative findings to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, and local and state prosecutors in 2020, which ultimately contributed to some of the criminal charges.
She is adamant that the courts must examine the evidence and decide the case, regardless of election cycles or changing political officeholders.
“Whenever government money may have been misused, taxpayers have a right to the full picture — who received the money, where it went, and how the system permitted it,” said Byrd, who is a candidate for state treasurer. “A public jury trial is the surest way to bring those facts into the open.”
Motions to Disqualify Attorney, Judge Halted Progress
Chaney and Harris founded Epic Charter Schools, an online public school, in 2011. Epic Youth Services, their private company that was contracted to manage the school, made the duo very wealthy over the following decade.
But amid the fallout of the scathing state forensic audit report, Epic Charter Schools cut ties with its founders and their management company.
Their longtime chief financial officer, Josh Brock, who agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid prison time, has testified that he, Chaney and Harris profited handsomely by dodging accountability rules for school spending, falsifying invoices and relying on taxpayer-funded school personnel, computers and facilities for carrying out administrative work the for-profit company was paid to do.
The three stand charged with more than a dozen counts, including embezzlement, conspiracy, presenting false claims to the state, and money laundering. Chaney and Harris deny wrongdoing.
The state’s case, filed in summer 2022, also alleges Epic school funds were used illegally to cover political donations, expenses for a California charter school, $1.1 million in Brock’s personal credit card expenses and $375,000 in Chaney’s personal credit card expenses.
But protracted legal battles seeking to disqualify a defense attorney and the assigned judge have the case far from resolved.
“Whenever you are prosecuting wealthy individuals, they are almost always going to put together a formidable defense team,” said Tracy Hresko Pearl, a criminal law professor who recently left the University of Oklahoma College of Law for the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. “If the defendants are not in jail, they are going to want to prolong the case, like we’ve seen here with attempts to disqualify the judge, or to get evidence thrown out. Defendants have constitutional rights, and those have to be taken seriously too.”
It’s also noteworthy that the Epic case is an unusually complicated, white-collar case for state prosecutors whose massive caseloads typically involve killings or illegal drugs.
There are multiple defendants and multiple felony counts, each with individual elements that carry a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And attorneys have to comb through tens of thousands of documents and consult with experts.
“I think it’s fair, as a member of the public, to expect this to be done and for it to be done with timeliness,” Pearl said. “It is also true that white-collar and financial crimes often take longer because they are much more complex.
“I understand the public wants justice here, but the risk is if you rush these types of cases, and the state loses, the defendants go free,: she said. “If the state does a bad job and these people get acquitted, as rightfully they should if the state does a bad job, that just sends a terrible message about how easy it is to get away with embezzling tens of millions of dollars in Oklahoma.”
“Delay Usually Favors the Defense”
The defendants being out on bond is important in explaining why it is taking so long, said Corbin Brewster, a criminal defense attorney who represented thousands of individuals facing criminal charges as the chief public defender in Tulsa County from 2017 to 2023. Chaney and Harris were arrested and booked into jail on June 23, 2022, then released on a $250,000 cash bond.
This is no ordinary case for state prosecutors, said Brewster, who estimated its progress rate as being “in the .01 percentile in terms of the length of time for a case to get to trial — and it’s not even to that stage.”
“If the evidence is tough, you are not in a hurry to go to trial and risk losing,” said Brewster, whose high-profile clients include former death row inmates Richard Glossip and Karl Fontenot, and one of the defendants in a new case alleging conspiracy, embezzlement and kickbacks involving voter-approved capital improvement funds at Tulsa Public Schools. “There is a tremendous amount of evidence in this case; their backs are against the wall. It looks like they're just holding on.”
In the early stages, Epic’s case transferred between judges many times.
Delays, many agreed on by both sides, pushed a scheduled preliminary hearing back multiple times in 2023. In November of that year, prosecutors asked to freeze an Epic Youth Services bank account used for the student Learning Fund; four months later, defense counsel agreed.
In January 2024, defense counsel requested another extension. This time, prosecutors objected.
The preliminary hearing finally got underway in March 2024, but after five days of testimony, it was halted abruptly without resolution. Nearly two years of legal wrangling ensued.
For one, Brock’s attorney sought to disqualify Chaney’s attorney, Gary Wood, claiming Wood had acted as Brock’s attorney while he worked for Chaney and Harris at the school and their private company.
Then, Oklahoma County District Court Judge Susan Stallings fought off repeated attempts by Chaney and Harris’ attorneys to disqualify her from the high-profile case.
But in November, after learning that Harris’s defense attorney, Joe White, had become the campaign committee chairman for the candidate seeking to unseat her in this year’s election cycle, Stallings voluntarily recused herself from the case.
Defense attorneys deny using stalling tactics in the case.
“Everything I did was to ensure that my client received a hearing in front of a fair and impartial judge,” Wood said. “Delay was in no way associated with it.”
While state prosecutor Jimmy Harmon has proposed a trial date for November, Wood said he wouldn’t entertain a date that soon.
“They haven’t even entered a plea yet,” he said.
He added that defense attorneys are now entitled to full discovery, including all the notes from the investigation and grand jury transcripts.
Prosecutors allege a years-long scheme to evade public school accountability reporting requirements, right up through Harris and Chaney’s 2020 formation of a new Epic school technology vendor company called EdTech, LLC.
But White, who represents Harris, said nothing changed from when the state first began investigating Epic’s financial practices in 2013 until 2021, when the school and its founders parted ways.
He questions why the state did not pursue its concerns through a civil case, and he argues the criminal case is past the statute of limitations, which he said is a constitutional issue.
He said he looks forward to discussing the case with Oklahoma’s next attorney general.
“We certainly welcome a fresh set of eyes, and I think we would certainly welcome the opportunity to sit down and discuss our concerns about the statute of limitations and why this investigation started in 2013,” said White.
A judge in April bound Chaney and Harris over for trial and set an arraignment date, when they will enter a formal plea.
That arraignment has been delayed because defense attorneys, who initially agreed to the date, are now arguing it was scheduled too late to comply with state law, that prosecutors lack sufficient evidence for the charges, and that the statute of limitations has expired on the charges, court records show.
“If the government wanted to, it could have the defendant arrested and require him to appear for arraignment,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who now works as a professor of practice at the University of Michigan Law School.
“Delay usually favors the defense in the outcome of the trial because evidence gets stale, memories fade, and the jury appeal diminishes,” she said. “The right to a speedy trial belongs to both the defendant and the public. The judge needs to balance those interests.”
Outlook with Outgoing Chief State Law Enforcement Officer
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond placed such a high priority on the Epic case that, on his first full day in office, he took over prosecutorial responsibility from the Oklahoma County District Attorney.
“These allegations involve tens of millions of Oklahoma tax dollars intended for public education, and the State has a strong interest in ensuring proper accountability,” he said then in a written statement. “Given the statewide impact of this case on public education funding, I believe it is wholly appropriate that fall under the purview of the Office of Attorney General,”
When a judge ruled in late April that sufficient evidence had been presented to send Harris and Chaney to trial, Drummond was bullish on seeing the case resolved.
“The defendants should take note: their attempts to escape accountability have failed,” said Drummond at the time. “We will not be deterred. The facts will come out, and justice will be served.”
Questions about how Drummond feels now, with no resolution in sight as he prepares to leave office, and why he wasn’t more aggressive in pursuing a civil asset forfeiture case against the defendants remain unanswered.
“We are not doing interviews on Epic because it's pending litigation,” said Leslie Berger, press secretary for the state attorney general’s office.
No law prohibits discussing litigation.
Former federal prosecutor Nick Coffey, a Democrat, and Jon Echols, a Republican, lawyer and small business owner who served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 2012 to 2024, are vying to replace Drummond in November’s general election.
Echols was among 65 sitting lawmakers — almost half the state Legislature — who received donations from Chaney, Harris or Brock between 2014 and 2020, according to the affidavit filed alongside the criminal charges in the Epic case.
Prosecutors allege some of those contributions came from a personal credit card Chaney financed with state education dollars.
Asked about the $4,000 in campaign contributions he received in 2018 from Chaney and Harris and their then-lobbyist, Echols pointed to his 2019 support for House Bill 1395, which became law and requires charter school management organizations to provide itemized, rather than estimated, expenditure information to the state.
Under that new level of scrutiny, the state found Epic had exceeded the 5% maximum in administrative costs allowed for most public schools and assessed $20.7 million in penalties.
“I was the floor leader that put that bill on the (House) floor the year after those campaign donations,” said Echols. “The express goal of that bill was to ensure this doesn't happen again. I can't comment on the court case, but what I can comment clearly is if I am elected attorney general, everyone is going to be treated the same. It makes zero difference to me how connected someone is politically or socioeconomically.”
Echols and Harris are members of an executive networking group called Young Presidents' Organization. Echols said they are not in the same forum, a confidential peer group of eight to 12 YPO members who meet regularly to share business, personal, and family challenges, and that Harris has moved on to the organization’s gold alumni network for members over 50.
“There is no personal relationship, and there hasn’t been one, between me and Ben Harris, David Chaney or anyone else connected to Epic,” Echols said. “If there was, I would recuse — from any case where I thought there was a personal relationship — but there is none.”
His opponent, Coffey, vowed to “aggressively carry the case forward,” if elected.
“I did complex criminal trials at the U.S. Attorney's Office,” Coffey said. “I will likely help with the case myself, and I think that’s notable because Jon Echols has never done a jury trial in his life. It has been a contentious case, but it’s really, really important. With for-profit schools popping up around Oklahoma, there is still public money involved. Oklahomans should be demanding transparency and accountability where money is being spent, but especially where $22 million could be misspent.”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
