August 14, 2009 05:42 PM UTC

Would McInnis' Campaign Funds Charity Have Been Illegal?

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: This little nugget from the Rocky Mountain News in 2004, dug up by a community member, would seem to belie McInnis’ claim that he couldn’t legally do what he promised:

Retiring Rep. Scott McInnis (R-03) plans to use part of his $1.3M campaign war chest to start his own charitable foundation — a rare but legal maneuver that watchdog groups have criticized in the past.” According to McInnis CoS Mike Hesse the foundation would work on issues McInnis focused on in Congress, including breast cancer research, education and conservation. The rest of the money would be available for political donations.

FEC guidelines permit the transfer as long as the funds are not converted for personal use. [Pols emphasis] It prohibits candidates from being paid from the groups they donate funds to, although that stipulation ends once the charity has spen[t] the original amount donated.

UPDATE #2: It would appear that a portion of today’s editorial in the Denver Post is in need of some revision:

Before McInnis left Congress in 2004, his chief of staff said the congressman wanted to use part of his remaining $1.3 million campaign fund to seed a charity that would help fund cancer research.

It was a noble idea that later ran aground, McInnis said, over legal ramifications.

McInnis has been wrongly attacked by some progressive activists who want to damage his candidacy on this issue. The former congressman’s answers in Fender’s story were plausible.

As it turns out, not so much! Original post follows.

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Another point in this week’s stories about gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis’ leftover campaign funds we think merits some additional clarification. Revisiting the Denver Post’s original article Wednesday:

“This is the first time I’ve ever heard of someone being criticized for giving something to charity,” McInnis said. “We had some ideas (for a nonprofit) that, after they were vetted by election lawyers, we were told we couldn’t do.”

As we’re always quick to note, we’re not and never represent ourselves to be experts on election law, particularly at the federal level. But we have questions about the veracity of McInnis’ claim that he could not legally have established a charity with his leftover campaign funds. We’ve not heard of such a restriction before, and many people have donated these funds to charitable causes after their careers were over–ex-Rep. Marilyn Musgrave even donated her surplus funds to a charity directly affiliated with her present employer, a contribution that was deemed entirely above-board despite the questions it invited.

With that, we’ll turn this over to our astute readers, and it wouldn’t be the first time our resident experts have settled a vexing question: would what McInnis proposed to do with his leftover campaign funds in 2004 have been illegal as he has repeatedly claimed this week, or not?

Because if the answer is “it’s not,” McInnis has yet another credibility problem that didn’t exist when the original story ran. You can complain all you want about liberals targeting you for ‘smear,’ but you can’t really blame them if your defense against the ‘smear’ is itself bogus.