Federal Election Commission Advisory Opinion Number 2003-10. http://ao.nictusa.com/ao/no/030010.html
Federal Election Commission Public Hearing. Tuesday, May 17, 2005, 10:00 AM. www.fec.gov/pdf/nprm/cand_solicitation_party/20050517hearing.pdf
Key question: Did Reid deliberately raised more corporate money from publicly-held corporations than he needed, then divert some of the excess in a series of generous donations to non-profit groups that, on the surface, benefited their mutual causes?
The donations to non-profits might then be illegally converted, then funneled back to Reid‘s campaign coffers through donations by the N/P officers and their co-conspirators, or subsets of them
These complicated transactions should draw scrutiny in legal and political circles to determine the extent to which state laws and campaign finance laws were violated in schemes that appear to launder corporate donations to a candidate, and should raise questions that should be investigated regarding whether shareholders in publicly-funded corporations were deceived, and whether the true destination of corporate money was concealed (SEC is interested in this).
Sen Reid may also have used non-profit, ethnic, hyphenated, or faith-based groups as middlemen for campaign transactions by a pattern of Reid funneling money from his family-run foundations to these different groups, that was laundered, then landed in Reid's campaign accounts, in order to obscure, if not cover-up, the original source of donations to his campaign coffers.
Reid, his family, or his henchmen might also have directed that campaign donations be made in the names of others without their knowledge or consent.
When the financial merry-go-round stopped, non-profit, ethnic, hyphenated, and faith-based individuals---the groups Reid needs to endorse his election effort---end up with a lot of money, some of which was then laundered, illegally converted, then funneled back into Reid’s campaign coffers.
Millions of dollars in donations to Reid might never have been disclosed to campaign regulators, because the type of groups Reid used weren’t governed by federal law. The public-spirited donors might not always have known where their tax-deductible money was headed, and don't control funds once they're donated.
Money gets transferred all the time and remains disclosed only to the extent required to be disclosed by applicable state and federal law---this gets complicated.
In another variaiton, Reid and others may have conspired to raise more money than was needed and then routed some of that money to other causes, such as supporting state candidates. As a result, the Reid firms and his family might be beneficiaries as a collateral effect due to influence-peddling.
There might be a pattern of disguising the original source of money might have been an effort to hide Reid’s simultaneous financial and legislative dealings with Reid family clients. Clandestine meetings may have been held to help this along in order to get access and push the clients' interests, and to hide the genesis of campaign funding.