Corruption in the Gingrich Campaign?

Is the already corrupt Newt Gingrich lining his pockets with campaign money?

• The campaign would not explain how the candidate "forgot" about $45,000 in receipts.
• The Washington Times found the better part of a million dollars in unexplained cash to Gingrich, family members and top staffers.

When Newt Gingrich’s campaign disclosed in October it planned to pay the candidate $70,000 for travel expenses in the third quarter, the transfer was an anomaly among presidential campaigns.

But weeks ago, the former House speaker revised his third-quarter bill:  Gingrich actually expected to personally receive $115,000 of the funds donated to his campaign to reimburse himself for expenses during that period reports the Washington Times.

The campaign would not explain how the candidate forgot about $45,000 in receipts, what they were for or why the campaign wasn’t simply paying the invoices directly, as other campaigns do.

Far beyond that payment, the uses of donations to Gingrich’s campaign are being obscured on a massive scale by the unprecedented use of a legally questionable tactic, The Washington Times found one that has accompanied the flow of the better part of a million dollars in unexplained cash to Gingrich, family members and top staffers.

The money reportedly was to reimburse employees for unspecified expenses in what amounted to petty cash exceeding their entire salaries, The Times’s analysis of federal records showed. The move would be permitted only if, election lawyers say, that money was spread across so many vendors that not a single company received more than $200 in total.

“That’s an enormous amount of money, and not $200 wound up in the same place? I find that extraordinarily hard to believe,” said Brett Kappel, an election-law lawyer for Arent Fox LLC, a law firm and lobbying group based in Washington, D.C. “I’ve never seen a major presidential campaign run this way but I’ve only been doing this for 21 years.

“If this recurs throughout the campaign, this is the kind of issue where you get audited,” he said.

In fact, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) flagged the issue Sept. 22, reminding Gingrich officials that, according to the law, campaigns may not simply report that significant amounts of money were paid to reimburse middlemen for other, untold expenditures. If staff foot a travel bill and are reimbursed, the underlying bills must be disclosed, unless the cumulative total spent by the campaign at each store, hotel, restaurant or other vendor in question remains less than $200.

The Gingrich campaign did not respond to repeated requests from the Washington Times for information about its expenditures and accounting practices.
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(Washington Times)