August 12, 2009 05:47 PM UTC

Long-Simmering Campaign Funds Scandal Explodes on McInnis

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• by: Colorado Pols

Not good, folks, as the Denver Post reports:

Just before leaving Congress in 2004, Scott Mc Innis’ staff said the exiting Republican wanted to use part of the $1.3 million left in his campaign fund to launch a nonprofit political organization that would address education, breast-cancer research and conservation.

Five years later, no such organization exists. Instead, the largest charitable donation McInnis made from his campaign funds was to a wilderness area named for McInnis as he was leaving Congress…

Most of the money that has been spent from McInnis’ congressional campaign fund went not to charity but to like-minded candidates and to promote Republican ideals, which McInnis said was always his intent. [Pols emphasis] He decided direct giving would be more efficient than the bureaucracy of a nonprofit, he said…

McInnis instead created the Western Way Political Action Committee and estimates he’s given more than $250,000 through that fund to about 40 candidates over the years.

About $96,000 has been given to charities through Western Way. But despite his staff’s singling out of breast cancer as a focus, health groups received relatively little of the money in the past five years. The total was compiled from Federal Elections Commission disclosures.

McInnis gave $51,500 from the PAC to McInnis Canyons, the Grand Junction-area wilderness named for him…

As the stories began to circulate last week about Scott McInnis’ heavy use of Western Way PAC in the last few months, clearly as a vehicle to build name recognition in advance of his gubernatorial campaign, one of many questions being asked was “what about the charity?” Liberals had attacked McInnis back in 2007 over the same issue, after all, but nobody paid much attention to his leftover money in the 2008 cycle since it went basically unused after McInnis aborted his Senate run early on (unless you lived in Garfield County, apparently).

Now that the facts of the matter are out, there’s really nothing about this situation that makes McInnis look in any way good. The simple fact is, he told the press in no uncertain terms in 2004 that he would give this money to charity and he didn’t. Any personal relationship he may have had to the cause he said he would give the money to is irrelevant, or if anything worse for him now that he’s reneged on his pledge. Bottom line: he used the money he said he would spend on a health care charity to fund Republican candidates, $50,000 for Ego-ponymous Canyons, and a good amount in the last few months to operate his much-criticized “shadow campaign.”

And let’s not forget the $5,000 to Tom DeLay’s legal defense fund.

Seriously, folks–anybody want to tell us how the optics on this are not absolutely disastrous? How does this not paint a picture of exactly the kind of dishonest, irresponsible “Tom DeLay Republican” opponent Josh Penry rails against in his stump speeches?