A little-noted development in Alabama politics in February has led, in part, to an ethics complaint being filed against former Congressman Mo Brooks.

Wayne Reynolds, vice president of the Alabama board of education, filed the complaint late last month after Brooks suggested in a radio interview that China influenced the outcome of his loss to Katie Britt in the Republican primary runoff last year.

That complaint would not have been filed, Reynolds said, if Brooks had not been elected as commissioner of the 5th Congressional District in north Alabama – the district he represented for six terms in Congress. That position also comes with a spot on the GOP’s steering committee, which is the main governing body of the state party.

In an interview with AL.com in April about his election to the position, Brooks downplayed its significance.

In an interview Friday, though, Reynolds noted that without Brooks holding that position, the state ethics commission would have no jurisdiction over comments Brooks made that the educator considered inappropriate.

During an interview with Montgomery radio station WACV last month, Brooks spoke at length about China and criticizing how its communist party runs the country.

“Communist China is very much aware of my views,” Brooks said. “And so they did everything they could to assist the election of somebody else to the United States Senate in 2022.”

That comment is what Reynolds said led him to file the complaint with the GOP ethics commission. And if Brooks is found to have violated party ethics rules, he could be removed from the steering committee. In addition to being a member of the state school board, Reynolds is also a member of the Alabama and Limestone County Republican executive committees.

In the radio interview, Reynolds said Brooks, “made some statements about the election and the influence of the communist party favoring his opponent. I felt, in that complaint, that that was not an appropriate position for a Fifth District member of the state executive committee to infer that any aspect of the Republican Party could be and would have been influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Britt defeated Brooks in a landslide victory, winning the majority of votes in 66 of Alabama’s 67 counties. Overall, Britt received 63 percent of the vote while Brooks received 37 percent.

Britt also outdistanced Brooks by 16 percentage points in winning the plurality of votes in the primary but the runoff was required since no candidate in the primary received a majority of the votes.

Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Brooks told WHNT-Channel 19 that the GOP ethics commission “has no ethics rules that come anywhere close to coming into play. I did not say Communist China helped any of my opponents.”