GOP files FEC complaint against Claire McCaskill

(From the Missouri Republican Party)

The Missouri Republican Party today filed a complaint their the Federal Election Commission over Claire McCaskill’s serious and ongoing campaign finance violations.

(Please click here to view the complaint.)

As was reported by several media outlets, Claire McCaskill recently filed a series of amendments to several years’ worth of campaign finance reports. The most egregious and news-worthy amendments were related to more than $550,000 in reporting errors during her 2006 campaign and her use of her private plane for political flights.

A week of investigation by the MOGOP uncovered additional of errors and outright distortion by McCaskill.

“In my 30 years of working in and around campaigns—most of them federal—I have never seen campaign violations as bad a Claire McCaskill’s,” said Lloyd Smith, Executive Director of the Missouri Republican Party. “Combined with her previous failure to pay $320,000 in taxes, Claire McCaskill’s failure to report thousands of contributors and more than half-a-million dollars in expenses and receipts is more evidence that Missourians cannot trust her as a watchdog for government spending. We hope that the Federal Election Commission will investigate McCaskill’s campaign activities, conduct a full audit of her campaign committee, and impose any fines that they believe are necessary.”

Among the issues included in the complaint:

* McCaskill failed to report approximately $277,000 in contributions and another $277,000 in spending during her 2006 campaign. This is a blatant violation of campaign finance law—and it is far from “routine.”

* McCaskill has repeatedly claimed that there were 143 previously-unreported contributors in her amended filings—but the real number appears to be well into the thousands. McCaskill’s amendments show that $245,000 was added under the category of unitemized contributions, which means that each contribution was less than $200. So assuming that every single donation was $199.99—at a minimum—there were 1,225 contributions that went unreported. This exposes McCaskill’s distortions and shows that her reporting errors run much deeper than she initially acknowledged.

* Whenever McCaskill pays for a political flight out of her own pocket, she is required to report them as an in-kind contribution. In March, she was caught using taxpayer resources to pay for political trips on the plane—flying to political events in Hannibal and Kansas City in 2007. She reimbursed the government for those trips, meaning she paid for them out of her own pocket, but those political flights STILL have not been reported as in-kind contributions to her campaign or the Democratic Party. This is an ongoing violation of campaign finance law, and it raises the question: what other political flights are out there that McCaskill has not reported? We don’t know, because she refuses to release any records related to the plane.