[Mb-civic] Remember this Jack-Ass?

[Jef Bek]

washingtonpost.com

FEC Faults Accounting at DeLay's PAC

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 12, 2005; A02

The Federal Election Commission criticized a political fund chaired by House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for misstating accounts and failing to
report debts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The watchdog agency issued its findings after auditing DeLay's Americans for
a Republican Majority PAC (ARMPAC) for 2001 and 2002. ARMPAC is one of a
growing number of "leadership" PACs, through which members of Congress
provide financing and electoral assistance to other candidates for office.

The agency did not take disciplinary action against DeLay or ARMPAC. But its
report said that the commission might in the future penalize the fund, an
act that usually involves a fine.

Campaign finance experts said that the findings, although not insignificant,
do not appear to involve flagrant breaches of law.

"There's certainly a lack of attention to detail and poor accounting
practices here, but these sorts of things are common in political accounts,"
said Kent Cooper, co-founder of PoliticalMoneyLine, a campaign finance
research Web site.

ARMPAC's accounting problems came during the 2002 election cycle, when it
raised and spent more than $3.6 million. Since 1999, several thousand
individual and corporate contributors have given more than $13 million to
ARMPAC and it, in turn, has spent millions to help Republicans win
elections.

A lawyer for ARMPAC, Donald F. McGahn II, played down the importance of the
audit.

"It didn't disclose any substantive violations of election laws; instead,
it's essentially accounting issues of a technical nature based on FEC
accounting minutiae," McGahn said.

He characterized the report as "relatively clean" and predicted that if
ARMPAC is fined, "it's not going to be a significant penalty."

Democrats and liberal groups lambasted DeLay for the infractions. "When it
comes to federal elections law, Tom DeLay and his special-interest friends
live by one set of rules, and everyone else lives by a very different set,"
said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee.

The audit said that ARMPAC made "material" misstatements about its
donations, cash on hand and disbursements. The discrepancies, which have
been corrected, totaled more than $100,000.

Auditors also said they had trouble examining the accounts because about 28
percent of contributor checks and a third of expense paperwork such as
invoices were missing.

ARMPAC failed to properly disclose debts totaling $322,306 that it owed to
25 vendors, the report said. McGahn said that the vendors were paid on time
and that the fund amended disclosure documents to comply with the auditors'
criticisms.

DeLay's fund also spent $203,483 from a non-federal account -- which
contained money relatively easy to raise in large chunks -- that should have
come from an account governed by tighter federal laws, which make the money
harder to collect in such sizable amounts.

ARMPAC has been repaying the non-federal account with the harder-to-raise
funds and has amended disclosure statements to reflect the changes, the
audit said.

The political action committee used the "soft money" to pay for fundraising
events in California, Florida and Puerto Rico, as well as for administrative
expenses and voter-mobilization drives, the audit said.

A separate fund created by DeLay and some aides, Texans for a Republican
Majority, is facing strong scrutiny in Texas.

Staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.