Grand Jury Indicts Alabama Governor : Probe: Republican Guy Hunt is charged with taking $200,000 from his inaugural fund for personal use. Three associates are also accused.

Gov. Guy Hunt was indicted Monday by a grand jury on charges of taking $200,000 from his inaugural fund for personal use.

The 13-count felony indictment included charges of theft, conspiracy and ethics violations. It said Hunt conspired with his inaugural fund accountant, Gene McKenzie, and two former aides.

The indictments against McKenzie and the others were not immediately available. A lawyer for McKenzie said the accountant also had been indicted, but he did not have details.

Hunt went to the Montgomery County Jail on Monday to be booked and fingerprinted, then was released.

“I’m totally innocent,” he said as he left the jail. “I’m going to fight. I’m going to serve out my term.”

The indictment did not specify what Hunt allegedly did with the $200,000. Hunt has said he had a campaign debt from a losing race for governor in 1978 and mortgaged some property to keep from going bankrupt.

Earlier, his press office issued a blistering statement calling the case a political concoction by a Democratic attorney general against Alabama’s first Republican governor this century. But the statement was later withdrawn.

Hunt remains in office. Under Alabama law, public officials charged with crimes retain their offices until conviction.

Hunt’s moneymaking preaching trips and other financial matters had been under scrutiny for months.

George Beck, one of the governor’s attorneys, said Hunt would plead not guilty at a Jan. 20 arraignment.

“We think there’s some basic misunderstanding about the accounting for these funds,” Beck said. “Hunt did not expend any funds without first getting the advice of an accountant and an attorney.”

McKenzie, who reported to the jail with Hunt, did not comment.

Alabama Atty. Gen. Jimmy Evans, who has been directing the grand jury for more than six months, also did not comment.

The grand jury met initially in June to review whether Hunt violated Alabama’s ethics law by using state aircraft on trips in which he accepted nearly $10,000 in offerings for his service as a Primitive Baptist preacher. It later expanded its investigation to cover other financial matters involving Hunt and his Administration.

The grand jury was formed after the Alabama Ethics Commission voted in September, 1991, that Hunt may have violated the ethics law with his preaching trips.

Terry Abbott, the governor’s press secretary, issued a statement saying Evans brought “these phony charges against a sitting Republican governor in a thinly veiled attempt to damage him, his family and the Republican Party. The attorney general has disgraced the good people of Alabama. The best Jimmy Evans can do is make libelous charges about the use of inaugural funds six years ago.”

Later, Abbott said the statement was released prematurely and had been withdrawn until Hunt’s attorneys had an opportunity to go over the charges.

The last sitting governor to be indicted was Evan Mecham of Arizona, on felony charges of fraud and perjury in 1988. A jury acquitted him but only after he was removed from office in an impeachment conviction by the state Senate on other grounds.