dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

The article:

IT’S BEEN MORE THAN A DECADE since South Florida Rep. Mark Foley was forced out of Congress for sending sexual text messages to teenage boys.

But Foley tapped his congressional campaign fund to dine on the Palm Beach social circuit four times in early 2017, ending with a $450 luncheon at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches.

Then there’s baseball-star-turned-senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky. He paid his daughter $94,800 from campaign money in the four years after he left office, only stopping when he’d bled his fund dry.

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And over the past 17 months, political advisor Dylan Beesley paid his firm more than $100,000 from the campaign account of Hawaii Congressman Mark Takai for “consulting services.”

It’s hard to imagine what Beesley advised. Takai was dead that whole time.

In their political afterlife, former politicians and their staffers are hoarding unspent campaign donations for years and using them to finance their lifestyles, advance new careers and pay family members, an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times, 10News WTSP and TEGNA-owned TV stations found.

Their spending makes a mockery of one of the fundamental principles of America’s campaign finance laws: Donations must be spent only on politics, not politicians’ personal lives.

Times/WTSP reporters analyzed more than 1 million records detailing the spending of former U.S. lawmakers and federal candidates. They found roughly 100 of these zombie campaigns, still spending even though their candidate’s political career had been laid to rest.

Of course, history is full of politicians stretching the definition of legitimate campaign expenses. But most of those cases at least involved a campaign of some sort.

By contrast, former Rep. Steven LaTourette, R-Ohio, had been out of office for more than three years when he spent $4,555 on Ohio State football tickets. Former Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, rented office space from his father’s hardware company for $9,600 and paid his wife almost $22,000 to handle paperwork in the six years after he left office.

Other ex-candidates spent leftover donations on airline tickets, club memberships, a limo trip, cell phones, parking and new computers, the investigation found. Some former lawmakers paid themselves thousands of dollars without providing any explanation for where the money went. One spent $940 at Total Wine.

They weren’t all low-profile political figures. Former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, still has an active presidential campaign account that he used to pay almost $16,170 to his daughter through 2017, five years after he last sought office.

None of the spending was formally investigated by the Federal Election Commission, which is responsible for stopping federal candidates from treating their campaigns like personal slush funds.

By law, donations should be spent on campaigning and the cost of being in office. They can also be refunded to donors or given away to other candidates, political committees or charities.

But the law doesn’t stop ex-lawmakers and losing candidates from keeping their campaigns running forever, even if they never re-enter politics.

Twenty of the campaigns identified by the Times/WTSP stayed active for more than a decade. Eight kept on spending even after the candidate they were supposedly working to elect had died — buying lavish dinners, paying cell phone bills and writing rent checks.

Six campaign finance experts told Times/WTSP reporters that some of the zombie campaign spending was a potential election-law violation that should have been investigated by the FEC.

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