With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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The Big Dig this week… The Feds Have New Questions about Herschel Walker’s Campaign Fundraising

It wasn’t enough that Herschel Walker’s ill-fated Senate campaign in Georgia had a rough run. Now the feds want to know more about financial moves the campaign made after Walker lost—including tens of thousands of dollars stashed in a “recount” fund long after Walker had conceded defeat.

Last week, the Federal Election Commission sent the Walker campaign committee (“Team Herschel”) a notice flagging a number of apparent violations. Some were fairly common clerical issues. Other items were more eye-catching, like the recount fund, which one campaign finance expert said looked like a “dumping ground for excess contributions.”

No dumping

Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the watchdog group Documented, who reviewed The Daily Beast’s data, said the “recount” account appeared to be a stash for excess cash that the campaign did not want to give back to donors.

“It looks like the Walker campaign largely treated its ‘recount fund’ as a dumping ground for excess contributions,” Fischer said. “It does not appear that Walker expressly fundraised for a recount or spent any recount funds seriously exploring a potential election challenge. Instead, the Walker campaign just allocated excess contributions to a recount fund.”

The FEC’s letter, addressing Team Herschel’s post-runoff report, cited an alleged violation none of the campaign finance experts interviewed for this article had ever seen before.

The letter, addressed to Walker campaign treasurer Sal Purpurra, notes, “It appears neither a recount was held nor did the committee disburse these funds for recount activities.” It warns that “failure to remedy these donation[s] may result in impermissible contributions.”

Loyal readers

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that advocates for greater transparency in elections, called the notice “striking.”

“It’s almost like they read our blog or the recent press reports talking about the issue of recount funds not getting enough scrutiny and potentially being used for things other than a recount,” he said.

How it worked

Filings suggest the decision to push money into the recount fund came from within the campaign itself.

Some of the transfers appear to have been pre-designated from the 2022 Georgia Victory Committee, a joint fundraising vehicle created for the runoff which also lists Purpurra as treasurer. This committee transferred money to the Walker campaign on three different days, according to FEC records. Each day, there were two transfers—one in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a smaller one, in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Each time, the campaign designated the smaller totals for the “recount,” for a combined total of around $70,000, according to FEC filings. Of that amount, around $29,000 came 10 days after the election, records show.

In other cases, the campaign appears to have redesignated some of its own donor funds to the “recount”—well after the election. One Palm Beach donor, for instance, directly gave the campaign $5,000 on Dec. 6—runoff day—which would have exceeded the $2,900 contribution limit.

Moves like those are what caught Fischer’s eye, leading him to view the account as an apparent “dumping ground.”

Legal beagle

The Daily Beast sent detailed questions to Purpurra. He wrote back, “All questions asked of Team Herschel in the recent FEC ‘Request for Additional Information’ letter for the 30 Day Post Run-Off report, will be directly replied to the FEC based on the timeline they have given us. This reply will take place thru their (Form 99) response letter system and will include any required amendment(s) as we have done in the past. These items are due to be filed with the FEC by March 23rd and will be part of the public record at that time.”

Purpurra’s response also noted that “Team Herschel has no comment as to any additional questions you have raised that are not included in the official FEC letter.”

Those questions included what the campaign plans to do with the pile of money it raised after the election, whether it plans to pay its debts, and why the campaign appears to have handsomely rewarded a “volunteer.”

Two weeks after the runoff, Team Herschel made three same-day payments totaling $127,500 for “logistics consulting” to a family friend of Walker and his wife Julie Blanchard. That friend, Michelle Beagle, does not appear to have been paid for work during the campaign. In a Dec. 10 Daily Beast article, spokesperson Timmy Teepell described her as “a loyal friend to Herschel and Julie, and a dedicated volunteer and supporter of the campaign.”

Read the full report here.

From Roger’s Notebook...

Below the belt. Did former President Donald Trump steal a UFC championship belt from the White House? In December, a “person familiar with the matter” told The Washington Post that a storage unit at the center of Trump’s stolen document case—which the government had helped Trump rent as part of his transition to private life, and which he filled with items from his administration—had been the landing pad for an array of post-presidential knick-knacks, including “suits and swords and wrestling belts.”

In 2018, Trump was photographed in the White House beside UFC interim welterweight champion Colby Covington. Covington had previously claimed that if he won the championship, he would travel to D.C. to deliver the belt to Trump. The White House photo shows Trump with the belt over his shoulder.

Paul’s well that ends well. Disgraced former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort gave up this fight this week, settling his federal tax suit with the Justice Department for $3.1 million, according to court filings. DOJ prosecutors had previously rejected Manafort’s third settlement offer. The government sued Manafort last April for failing to disclose nearly two dozen foreign bank accounts.

Mandel effect. Former Ohio GOP senatorial contender Josh Mandel’s campaign has blamed its former treasurer for a $15,000 FEC fine related to misreported primary contributions, Cleveland.com reported.

According to the FEC, the Mandel team failed to timely report dozens of donations totaling $147,601 made in the days leading up to the May 3 primary, which Mandel lost to now Senator J.D. Vance. Mandel’s treasurer at the time, professional political accountant Thomas Datwyler, was approached with a job offer last month by the beleaguered George Santos, but rejected it, part of a bizarre series of events that left the Santos campaign treasurer-less for more than three weeks. (As of a filing today, Datwyler is no longer treasurer for former Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s leadership PAC.)

Missing person report. After three weeks of not having a treasurer—and a few days after the FEC informed him that he can’t raise money if the position goes vacant for 10 days—George Santos’ campaign committee has officially named a new bookkeeper. However, no one, including The Daily Beast, has been able to confirm that the person, “Andrew Olson,” actually exists.

The filing, submitted Tuesday, lists a gmail address for Olson, which The Daily Beast hasn’t been able to trace to a real person. It also puts Olson’s physical address—and the campaign’s address—at an apartment building outside Santos’ district. Santos was living in that building in December, as his sister, the apartment’s tenant of record, faced eviction, The Daily Beast previously reported. A Queens County court filing earlier this month states that the eviction claim was settled, but also notes that Santos’ sister had vacated the apartment on Jan. 18. George Santos told The Daily Beast in early January he had moved out of the apartment and was living elsewhere.

Santos is also conspicuously absent from his fellow GOP statesmen in a new joint fundraising committee created this week, called “New York Majority Makers.” The group’s treasurer: Datwyler.

COP out. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) converted his campaign committee into a PAC, according to an FEC filing submitted Tuesday. The PAC, Country Over Party, inherits the $2.4 million Kinzinger’s campaign had on hand after the anti-Trump Republican stepped down from Congress at the end of 2022.

Wake-up call. According to a CNBC report published on Tuesday, GOP officials who have decried “woke capitalism” have accepted “tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from some of the same Wall Street money managers they have attacked” for pushing ‘far-left’ positions on environmental, social and corporate governance issues.

“Since taking control of the U.S. House, top Republicans have refused meetings with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and created a working group to ‘combat the threat to our capital markets posed by those on the far-left pushing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) proposals,’” the report says.

But 10 of the 29 Republicans on the Financial Services Committee—including its chairman, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC)—accepted a total of $140,000 from major companies that fall under their target list.

Mattgaet. After a sweeping yearslong investigation into alleged sex trafficking and other crimes, DOJ prosecutors told Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) last week that they were not bringing charges. That would appear to put the onus back on the House Ethics Committee to either resume or drop its own investigation into the congressman, after tabling the probe so the DOJ could complete its work.

The matter appeared in a summary report of the House Ethics Committee’s activities during the 117th Congress, published last month, which says that “[t]he committee, following precedent, deferred consideration of the matter in response to a request from DOJ.”

“At the conclusion of the 117th Congress, the Committee had not completed its investigation into this matter,” the report says. “Representative Gaetz was reelected to the House for the 118th Congress.”

But now with the GOP in charge, and Gaetz having received unknown promises from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy amid his confirmation fight last month—“I ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for,” Gaetz said—those odds may be slim. And, as the report notes, throughout the 117th Congressional term, the House Ethics Committee issued only one—count ’em, one—subpoena.

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s political committees have paid a combined $307,000 in security expenses to a company with just one officer: Tulsi Gabbard’s sister. Sam Brodey explains why campaign finance experts say the payments raise “red flags.”

Ron DeSantis is trying to sell a populist pitch that AP courses aren’t worth the trouble—but according to his high school yearbook, DeSantis was an AP “student of the year” on his way to Yale. Jake LaHut and Zachary Petrizzo got the scoop.

Steve Bannon’s representatives initially denied The Daily Beast’s reporting that he wasn’t paying his legal bills. Now one of his lawyers is suing him. Check out Jose Pagliery’s redemption song here.

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