How do politicians access campaign contributions for personal use?
Slush funds / Super Pacs
''In 1979, Congress amended the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act to make it illegal for candidates to use excess campaign contributions for personal expenses. Ten years later, lawmakers stiffened the rules even more: They repealed a provision that allowed some of that money to used by lawmakers who had been covered by a grandfather clause.
OK, they’ve really got this airtight now, some may have thought. There’s not the slightest chance that candidates could tap into it any longer for, say, luxury football boxes or overseas vacations. Any unused money would either have to be kept for a future campaign or turned over to their political party to fund other candidates, it was assumed.
It didn’t turn out that way. According to campaign watchdogs, politicians created a loophole big enough to fly the old space shuttle through. While they still aren’t allowed to use leftover cash directly for their personal use, they can use the money to set up political action committees for other candidates and other causes. Many of these are called “leadership PACs,” and what the organizers do with the money going to these groups apparently is pretty much unregulated.
“It’s a political slush fund,” Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told “60 Minutes” in 2013. “Over time, we’ve had them. They’ve been outlawed. They spring back in new guises, and this is the latest guise. Since they weren’t around when the ban on personal use was put into place, they’re not covered by it. They can be used for literally anything.”
source http:// www.bnd.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/answer-man/article19572627.html#storylink=cpy