The New York Review of Books - 24.04.2020

(Axel Boer) #1

April 23, 2020 21


The legal test for campaign expendi-
tures is straightforward. Legislators are
prohibited by law from spending their
campaign cash on themselves, for ex-
ample, to pay for a country club mem-
bership or a vacation to Disney World.
If a candidate or officeholder would
make the expenditure irrespective of
their political situation, it’s considered
a “personal use,” and is forbidden as a
way to prevent contributors from brib-
ing politicians. A gigantic loophole
exists, however, in the personal-use
prohibition in the form of leadership
political action committees.
The ostensible purpose of a lead-
ership PAC is to collect money to do-
nate to fellow legislators. Stefanik has
one. It’s called E-PAC, and its stated
purpose is to elect GOP women to
Congress. Ninety-four percent of GOP
House members have leadership PACs
(78 percent of Democrats do, according
to Issue One, a nonprofit advocate for
campaign finance reform). In addition
to country club memberships and Dis-
ney vacations, leadership PACs have
paid for legislators to attend Broad-
way shows, go to the Super Bowl, and
stay in luxury resorts, all in the name
of “fundraising.” Public servants living
large off their contributors is the result
of a dysfunctional regulatory system
and a Congress that likes the status quo
too much to fix it.
Devin Nunes has a leadership PAC
called New PAC that gets about half
of its contributions from small donors,
according to the campaign watchdog
Open Secrets. In the 2018 cycle, Nunes
disbursed a little more than 35 percent
to fellow Republicans. Since 2013, he
has spent PAC money on a tight-knit
group of campaign consultants and
“fundraising” expenses that included
Celtics tickets ($14,638), winery tours
($5,000), and Las Vegas junkets
($42,741), according to McClatchy.
In July 2018, when a coalition of
government-watchdog groups filed a
complaint with the Federal Election
Commission over New PAC spend-
ing $5,518 on private jets, FEC staff
deemed the amount unworthy of an
enforcement action. As of this writing,
the commission has not had a quorum
since September 2019. Without one, it
is unable to authorize even preliminary
investigations. The law itself is easy to
fix: simply add a “personal use” restric-
tion to leadership PACs. A bipartisan
bill exists but likely faces a hostile re-
ception from Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell, who already killed
a Democratic bill that reforms the FEC
and breaks the deadlock. The status
quo works well for him.
This permissiveness also allows de-
ceptive PACs to thrive. Today, anyone
can create a super PAC or political ac-
tion committee, raise contributions on
behalf of a candidate or cause, and then
keep most of the money for themselves.
It’s perfectly legal. They don’t even
have to call it fundraising. These scam
PACs raise money to support a candi-
date or cause, but most of the contribu-
tions go to the people or entities behind
the PAC. They escape accountability
in part because they are not officially
affiliated with the candidate for whom
they solicit money.
Scam PACs appear to be more prev-
alent on the right, although, since the
FEC does not track them and they’re
not precisely defined, it’s hard to cal-
culate their number and composition.
Consultants on both the left and the


right run scam PACs. There are around
seven thousand active political commit-
tees registered with the FEC. Accord-
ing to a Politico story last December,
hundreds of unaffiliated pro-Trump
PACs have raised more than $46 mil-
lion, mostly from small donors.
A number of folks have made a living
doing this. David Bossie is one of them.
A longtime GOP activist and former
deputy Trump campaign director, Boss-
ie’s group, the Presidential Coalition,
collected more than $18 million in 2017
and 2018 promising to support conserva-
tive candidates. Of the $15.4 million the
group spent, only about $425,000 went
to the candidates. The rest went to con-
sultants and to buy books coauthored
by Bossie, according to an exposé by
the Campaign Legal Center and Axios.
The report resulted in a rare rebuke by

the Trump campaign. Bossie endured a
few months of exile, including from his
perch as a commentator on Fox News,
before Trump welcomed him back into
the fold after a private meeting.
A sinister subset of the scam-PAC
world collects contributions with ag-
gressive telemarketing. Politico and
ProPublica detailed how a PAC called
the Conservative Majority Fund ran a
fundraising campaign in 2012 promis-
ing donors it would hire investigators to
prove that Barack Obama was ineligi-
ble to be president because he was not
a US citizen. The pitch collected $2.8
million from 30,000 donors in just five
months. The people behind the PAC
had a history of raising money and
keeping 80 to 90 percent of it. There is
no indication funds were spent on pri-
vate investigators.

A Reuters investigation revealed a
network of fundraisers that created
PACs to collect money ostensibly on be-
half of state troopers, firemen, injured
veterans, and to fight breast cancer.
Drug addicts and prisoners on work re-
lease staffed their call centers. Little, if
any, of the money gathered went to the
causes for which it was raised. Donors
who learned of the scam from reporters
were justifiably outraged.
Lee Goodman, a former FEC
commissioner and Republican, told
Reuters, “Federal election laws were
designed to prevent corruption, not to
protect consumers.”

On the day of his inauguration,
Trump broke with precedent and
filed for reelection. The message was

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