August 05, 2009 05:25 PM UTC

McInnis' "Shadow Campaign" Too Clever By Half Once Again

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• by: Colorado Pols

From the Colorado Statesman:

Months before Scott McInnis announced his campaign to unseat Gov. Bill Ritter in 2010, the former congressman spent more than $13,000 of the donations made to his federal leadership Political Action Committee to solicit support for the Colorado Republican Party, according to an analysis by The Colorado Statesman of campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday, July 31.

McInnis, who represented the 3rd Congressional District from 1993 to 2005, used $13,399.97 from The Western Way Leadership PAC to fund two mailings promoting the Republican Party. The first letter, mailed in March, and the second, mailed in May, went to an undisclosed number of Colorado Republicans.

“The first letter was asking Colorado Republicans which direction they thought the party should head,” McInnis campaign spokesman Sean Duffy told The Statesman on Friday. “The second, in May, was a letter to promote what the party had done.”

…The Western Way PAC, which McInnis established in 2000, had nearly $750,000 cash on hand at the end of June. In addition to what it spent on the two mailings, the PAC put out $45,553.86 for clerical work, cell phone service and legal fees, with $11,400 of that going to charitable contributions during the first six months of 2009…

“Sarah Palin Tweets and wants to write a book. Scott McInnis uses what resources he has to tell the GOP that Scott McInnis cares about the GOP,” [CSU professor John] Straayer said. “Aside from the question of using old campaign money for this, I see it as pretty standard stuff.”

According to The Statesman analysis, McInnis’ PAC was somewhat inactive during the months leading into the 2008 election. Other than clerical, banking and charitable donations made mostly to Western Slope organizations and Mesa State College, The Western Way gave only one political donation in 2008 – a $10,000 expenditure to the Western Heritage 527, which is led by McInnis campaign advisor and former D.C. staffer Mike Hesse. [Pols emphasis]

You’ll recall word of these letters from Scott McInnis first surfaced in April, contributing to already escalating speculation about McInnis’ “shadow candidacy” and compliance with election law.

Putting aside questions about the law, which most of our readers understand is shot through with enough loopholes to make compliance a semantic technicality, the real problem with this is the way it looks–it’s obvious that this letter from McInnis’ PAC was intended to benefit McInnis personally, not to genuinely assist the party with anything. And the fact that Western Way PAC spent over five times as much money during this electoral off-year as they did in all of the critical 2008 election cycle is about as clear an indicator as you could ever ask for of why this PAC exists–couching it as money spent “on behalf of the Republican Party” is an almost insulting pretense.

Given the rather unfortunate disclosure related to McInnis and ‘our 527’ that exploded into the news just a couple of weeks later, with all the calling cards of a high-level red-on-red hit, we’d say somebody well placed in the Colorado Republican Party agrees.

UPDATE: Really was an awful lot of money spent for an off-year, wasn’t it? These newly-filed expense reports for McInnis’ PAC might be legally problematic after all, pending expository homework that seems to be busily underway.