It’s probably sheer folly to expect transparency from a candidate who attempts to dump his last name in the middle of a campaign. Even for Nevada, though, Rory Reid’s attempt to rinse donations through a series of strawman PACs sets records for brazenness. Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun reported yesterday that Harry Reid’s son took more than 75 times the legal limit from the Economic Leadership PAC for his disastrous run for governor, which then laundered the money through 75 other PACS to get it back to Reid’s campaign coffers:
Reid solicited donations for the Economic Leadership PAC, which raised more than $800,000 over a five-month period – donations that were then disbursed in $10,000 increments to dozens of other PACS, which quickly funneled the money back to the candidate’s campaign account.
Records show many of the PACS had names implying rural provenance –such as the Douglas County Committee for Change and Lyon County Leadership Fund – but they all had the same Las Vegas residential address before being quietly dissolved after the election. The money laundered through these PACS often resided there only for a couple of days, a transaction that was needed to, they believed, comply with contribution limits on a technicality. The Reid campaign could then quickly make use of the money in a futile attempt to salvage his faltering gubernatorial bid.
Reid told me today that he cleared what he did with his legal counsel – Paul Larsen – and the secretary of state’s office. “What we did was fully disclosed and complied with the law,” Reid said. “We did it because it was legal. If it’s a statement on anything, it’s a statement on the failure of campaign laws. This was not done in the dark of night. We disclosed everything we did.”
Indeed. But those PACS were named in such a way as to disguise why they were created and there is no other way to see this than a maneuver to get around the campaign contribution limits. “Just because you’ve never seen it before doesn’t mean it’s wrong or illegal,” Reid said. “It’s just a different structure.”
Indeed. And a prison is really nothing more than a different residential structure, too. Reid had better hope that his legal team got this one right, because he may become intimately familiar with that other “different structure” in the future. Ralston called the secretary of state for Nevada, who had never heard of such a scheme, and who promised to alert the attorney general if the facts warrant it.
Reid is already spinning this, after Ralston’s exposé, with his “statement on the failure of campaign laws,” but Ralston points out that existing law prohibits the kind of straw-man donations at the heart of this scheme. Even if Reid manages to avoid prosecution, his political career will be all but finished, and perhaps Nevadans will start looking into what other nonsense the Reid family has conducted over the years in Nevada and Washington.
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