REALITY BITES: McMAHON LEARNS SHE’S NOT ABOVE THE LAW 01.05.2010

Hartford, CT – While defending her campaign finance report, in which hundreds of thousands of dollars in disbursements were listed as in-kind contributions from Linda McMahon herself, her campaign said of the filing, “Why would we amend or re-file something that without question is filed correctly?" The Day’s Ted Mann, who broke the story, wrote that the “lack of detail appears to run afoul of federal regulations requiring campaigns’ spending to be itemized and disclosed to the public” and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) recently agreed.

On Christmas Eve Day, the FEC wrote to McMahon, directing her to disclose the recipients of nearly $570,000 in payments by her campaign. Refusing to comment on the legality of their filing, only saying to the Manchester Journal Inquirer that they would “review the routine correspondence” McMahon learned the hard way that reality bites, and the FEC isn’t kidding around.

“Throughout her career in the entertainment industry, Linda McMahon has shown an utter disregard for the law,” said Connecticut Democratic Party Communications Director Colleen Flanagan. “While that may have served her well in the world of wrestling, she won’t be quite as successful ducking the law as she runs to be one of the people who write it.”

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FEC demands more information on McMahon campaign vendors

By Ted Mann

Publication: TheDay.com

Published 01/05/2010 12:00 AM

The Federal Election Commission has directed Republican Linda McMahon to disclose the recipients of more than $567,000 in payments made by the candidate during the start-up of her campaign for the U.S. Senate.

The payments, for services ranging from political consulting to legal advice to computer assistance, were listed simply as in-kind contributions from the candidate herself on an initial campaign finance report McMahon filed last year. That meant the identities of some of the campaign’s vendors, including top-flight Republican political strategists and law firms, were not disclosed to the public.

After The Day first reported on the in-kind contributions in December, the McMahon campaign blasted the article as "erroneous," since the campaign had not received a notice from the FEC requesting more detailed disclosures. And a spokesman said he saw no reason to file additional details with the FEC disclosing the identities of the campaign’s vendors.

"Why would we amend or re-file something that without question is filed correctly?" McMahon spokesman Ed Patru said on Dec. 11.

But attorneys for the FEC believe more detail is required. In a letter sent to the campaign on Christmas Eve, the commission instructs the campaign to provide the names of the recipients of McMahon’s in-kind payments, information that is "essential to the full public disclosure of your federal election campaign finances."

Campaigns must disclose the identities of vendors paid for goods and services if the in-kind payments total more than $200 over an election cycle, wrote Robin Kelly, a senior campaign finance analyst at the commission. The threshold for disclosure is $500 for expenses related to "travel and subsistence."

Among the in-kind contributions in McMahon’s October quarterly filing are substantially larger expenditures, including tens of thousands paid for legal advice and consulting work.

Patru, the campaign spokesman, said in e-mail exchanges last year that many of those expenses were paid for by McMahon herself because they occurred before her formal declaration of her candidacy, and before the campaign committee’s accounts were set up. Patru also provided a list of some vendors paid by the campaign, including the law firm Bryan Cave, the prominent Republican consulting firm November Inc., and RAD Computing, but not an itemized list of the disbursements to each vendor.

A request for comment on the FEC letter was left Tuesday morning with the McMahon campaign.

FEC questions McMahon’s in-kind expenditures that her campaign had defended

By Don Michak

Journal Inquirer

Published: Tuesday, January 5, 2010 10:08 AM EST

The Federal Election Commission has flagged hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign expenditures described as in-kind contributions by Linda McMahon, the Greenwich Republican and former World Wrestling Entertainment executive seeking to unseat U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd.

In a letter sent on Christmas Eve day to the treasurer of McMahon’s campaign committee, an FEC analyst asked that the candidate’s third-quarter campaign finance report be corrected to include information that was “missing” about its vendors, including the dates, amounts, and purposes of the purchases.

The letter, in which the regulator gave the committee to Jan. 28 to respond or face an unspecified enforcement action, usually would be considered a routine reminder to a campaign that it should amend a report to adhere to FEC rules.

The notice, however, came less than two weeks after the McMahon campaign responded angrily to a much-publicized report in The Day of New London suggesting it had run afoul of the regulations requiring campaign spending to be itemized and publicly disclosed.

The newspaper reported that McMahon’s in-kind contributions of more than $567,000, including outlays for computer support, legal consulting, political strategy consulting, and survey research, were “far more extensive than usual and apparently include a broad array of campaign activities.”

Her third-quarter filing, it said, didn’t include information to show what companies or individuals volunteered or were paid for that work.

The McMahon campaign’s lawyer, Michael Toner, subsequently blasted The Day’s report as “erroneous,” insisting that the campaign had fully complied with all FEC reporting regulations and reported the in-kind contributions “exactly as the FEC prescribes in its published materials,” according to The Day.

Toner also told the newspaper that the FEC hadn’t sent any correspondence to the campaign about its report, so that there was “absolutely no basis for this story.”

Asked Monday for comment about the FEC’s letter, Ed Patru, McMahon’s campaign manager, issued a single-sentence response.

“The campaign is reviewing the routine correspondence that it recently received from the FEC concerning the campaign’s third-quarter report, and the campaign will respond appropriately to the correspondence well ahead of the Jan. 28 due date,” he said.

Colleen Flanagan, the spokeswoman for the Connecticut Democratic Party and a Dodd campaign surrogate, showed considerably less restraint.

“Throughout her career in the entertainment industry, Linda McMahon has shown an utter disregard for the law,” Flanagan said Monday. “While that may have served her well in the world of wrestling, she won’t be quite as successful ducking the law as she runs to be one of the people who write it.”