Posted on 04/21/2007 1:25:21 PM PDT by shrinkermd
Management Fees Exceed Political Donations From Tennessee Presidential Hopeful's Account
In the five years since Republican Fred Thompson left the Senate, he has maintained his political fund-raising account -- and it has paid more money to his son than it has contributed to help elect Republicans to Congress, records show.
Mr. Thompson, of Tennessee, announced that he would not seek re-election to the Senate in 2002. But since then, his political action committee has paid $244,000 in "management/consulting fees" to his son's consulting firm in Nashville, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
During the same period, the Fred D. Thompson PAC donated a total of $225,000 to Republican candidates and party organizations, according to the reports.
...Mrs. Clinton's HILLPAC has paid about $2 million in salaries since 2002, while contributing $2 million to Democratic candidates for office. Mr. Edwards's PAC paid about $1 million in salaries while contributing $200,000 to Democrats when he used it during the 2002 and 2004 elections. Mr. Edwards primarily used his PAC to fund his political career, rather than to contribute to Democratic candidates. Mr. Obama, who only had a PAC for the 2006 election, paid about $500,000 in salaries and donated $770,000 to Democrats.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
IF you click on the link for “breakdown of expenditures, you will not find Hillary ...you WILL find Hilleary, however.
What a difference a vowel makes...just ask Vanna!
Someones going to use that crap as prop....some one ought to tell them to remove that from their site.
IF you click on the link for “breakdown of expenditures, you will not find Hillary ...you WILL find Hilleary, however.
I expect, since you’re curious, that you’ll be contacting Daniel Thompson’s office bright and early Monday morning to have your query answered.
I look forward to you keeping us informed.
The ignorant leading the blind. Carry on.
Yes it’s a major typo on the part of Open Secrets and I just sent them an e-mail asking them to correct it, because they mixed up Van Hilleary with Hillary Clinton — hopefully they’ll fix it ASAP.
>It does give a strong appearance of impropriety.<
If he was’t running, what needed management and consulting?
>Somebody screwed up. Open Secrets needs to take that Clinton donation off his file.<
Oh-Oh! Cover-up! Cover-up!
Wow, you're acknowledging that they made a mistake and took responsibility for the post. I think the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs will be held in Hell this year.
Compared to the other ones they showed, it looked like his was average, with some paying out less than they spent like his did, and only one paying out more, that of a person who was trying to buy votes.
But nobody is forced to give money to a PAC, and their records are open to the public, so everybody would know. Maybe most of the donations came from people who wanted to help out the son with his consulting career.
I DID NOT MAKE A MISTAKE.
OPEN SECRETS MADE AN ERROR.
In my original post, I posted it with a caveat, and then continued researching it, and found that in the FEC report it indeed did say Hilleary, that combined with people here mentioning that there really was a Van Hilleary running for Senate in TN prompted me to immediately request the related posts to be pulled and I personally wrote to Open Secrets asking them to make the correction.
You are just such a hater, you just can’t stand anyone else who is honest.
It wasn’t “given” to his son, his son received payment for services, whatever they were, to manage the PAC. The other PACs mentioned all seemed to have more money than this spent to manage them (btw, I think “managing” includes expenditures used to raise the money, like if you did direct mail advertising).
If the son wasn’t actually working for the PAC, now that would be interesting.
SOMEBODY’S AFRAID FRED WILL GET NOMINATED!
You thought you had something on Fred Thompson. Proof that would help your candidate, the liberal Rudy Giuliani, look better in the eyes of some folks.
YOU POSTED MISLEADING INFORMATION FROM A QUESTIONABLE SOURCE AND THEN HAD THE MODS REMOVE IT!
You jumped the shark and now the evidence is gone.
But some of us know better.
The truth is known.
JimRob called you a liberal troll the other day and he was right! Make that a troublemaking liberal troll.
Sounds like a good plan to me, to keep the account, just in case. So what if his son has been paid from it? Isn't that what it's for, to pay for the upkeep of the campaign, of which the manager is a part? I don't think personal fund-raising accounts are normally used for a candidate other than for whom it is opened.
If his son is employed to ‘manage’ the account, it is not unusual to be paid for this. Nothing untoward about this, at all.
Probably managing the PAC, making sure it files it’s quarterly reports, makes sure all the donations are appropriately categorized, analyses requests for money from the PAC, does the legal work to determine which donations can be used for which purposes, and which requests can be served from which bucket or any bucket.
Then there’s the actually fund raising, sending letters, running breakfasts, phone calls, whatever they did to raise money.
And there’s probably a secretary, equipment for copying, computer services, etc.
Anybody can set up a PAC. And you can ask people to give it money, and you can pay yourself to manage it. If your PAC is useless, people won’t give it money, unless they like you, in which case you have found a way to get paid for being liked.
Which you could also have done by just going to the people and getting them to hire you, if they were looking just to funnel you money.
You will want to be careful. Mia T. made some mistake and had to ask for her posts to be pulled, right before she was zotted. Heads up......
shrinkermd wrote: “Apprently, according to the WSJ, it is common to have a PAC after leaving office; however, this seems self-serving and not an easy thing to justify.”
Nice try. But, as Hillary said to Bill, “No cigar.” Or, like Mitt Romney, that dog don’t hunt.
From the WSJ article:
“Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the former senator, said Daniel Thompson is paid to manage the fund-raising operation and file campaign-finance reports with the FEC. ‘If you look at other PACs, such as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or Barack Obama, all three of them pay their PAC administrators more than double what Dan was taking to administrate the PAC,’ Mr. Corallo said.”
“Mrs. Clinton’s HILLPAC has paid about $2 million in salaries since 2002, while contributing $2 million to Democratic candidates for office. Mr. Edwards’s PAC paid about $1 million in salaries while contributing $200,000 to Democrats when he used it during the 2002 and 2004 elections. Mr. Edwards primarily used his PAC to fund his political career, rather than to contribute to Democratic candidates. Mr. Obama, who only had a PAC for the 2006 election, paid about $500,000 in salaries and donated $770,000 to Democrats...”
“Mr. Thompson’s PAC has been largely dormant since he left the Senate in early 2003. He has raised only a few thousand dollars and has drawn the account down by making charitable and political contributions, and paying management fees to his son.”
“Just before leaving Congress, Mr. Thompson donated $100,000 to the campaign arm of Senate Republicans and $50,000 to the Tennessee Republican Party. Since then, his largest donations have been to charity.”
“During the 2006 election, the top recipients of donations from Mr. Thompson’s PAC were a small liberal-arts university associated with the Churches of Christ and a foundation to fight blindness. Each received $10,000. The PAC made a total of $25,000 in charitable contributions and gave $19,200 to Republican candidates.”
“Mr. Thompson gave $6,000 to help elect Tennessee Republican “Bob Corker to the Senate. He also made small contributions to Republican Sens. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, Mike DeWine of Ohio and George Allen of Virginia. Mr. DeWine and Mr. Allen lost their re-election campaigns.”
“In the first quarter of 2007, the PAC contributed $5,000 to charity and paid Mr. Thompson’s son $2,000 in management fees. It had $30,000 remaining in the bank.”
$5,000 for three months?
From RedState.com:
“OMG! Notice they had to lump it all in to make it a really big number because saying they paid him about $48,000.00 a year for five years just doesn’t sound as scandalous — especially when you consider similarly situated candidates have been paying multiple people orders of magnitude more per year to manage their PACs.
And what is more scandalous? Fred Thompson has given more money to charity than to candidates for public office! Oh, the horror.
Pffft.”
http://www.redstate.com/stories/elections/2008/is_this_the_best_they_can_do
Please, Rudy Paul McRomney supporters, keep this kind of stuff up! You’re helping us to refine our rapid responses to most every kind of BS charge you guys can conjure up. It’s good warm-up material to play with until we meet the Clintons next year for some real hardball. LOL!
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