Campaign Treasurer Goes to Argentina

The campaign treasurer for Nancy Detert, a candidate running in the Florida Congressional race to replace Katherine Harris, absconded with $97,000 from Detert's campaign treasury, lost $27,000 in Buenos Aries and can't repay the full amount.

Detert, a Venice Republican, wants to put the $94,000 back into the bank and keep campaigning, but she's already been warned that she should clear it with the board of the Federal Election Commission.

Now, Detert is worried that the money will be tied up for six months while her attorneys and FEC attorneys haggle over campaign finance regulations.

Meanwhile, opponents for the 13th District seat -- who were already outpacing her in fund-raising -- will gain even more ground, she fears.

"This is almost getting impossible," Detert said. "I can lose my election because I got robbed?"

FEC officials say they just aren't sure how to handle the money being paid back to Detert because they've never seen a case like this.

Randy Maddox, who was Detert's campaign treasurer, took $97,000 from the congressional campaign early this month and flew to South America.

The parents of the globetrotting treasurer, in an attempt to do the right thing, want to fix their son's stupidity and make things right by paying the missing $27,000. The problem is that such a sum exceeds the legal limit for a contribution by the couple to the tune of just shy of $23,000.

The FEC says it has never encountered such a situation (perhpas because embezzlers rarely return the money and their parents never step into help) and thus have no way of determining hwo to treat the money. The Skeptic suggests not treating the repayment as a

"contribution." Why would an agent of a thief, returning the stolen property, be considered as having made a “contribution?” The theft wasn’t an “expenditure was it? This shouldn’t be hard. RAD is chocked full of smart analysts. So I don’t get what the problem is. Is this an indication of a vacuum in senior staff? I hope not.

I agree with Allison's assessment of the Reports Analysis Division staff (RAD) and I too worry about the senior leadership, but I don't think that the problem is a lack of senior leadership, but rather a senior leadership so paralyzed by fear of being thought of as partisan that they have lost the capacity to apply common sense.

When the FEC became the partisan whipping post of every "reformer" on the block, the senior leadership became incapable of making a decision without thinking about the backlash. This failure to make a rational decision, one which clearly cries out for a modicum of common sense, doesn't mean there won't be backlash, it will simply come in a different form.

The whole purpose of an independent agency, of which the FEC is one, it insulate the agency and its employees from the vagrancies of partisan politics. While the FEC cannot escape politics all together, the partisanship surrounding their mission has turned common sense issues into problems requiring a 60 day Advisory Opinion process, involving the cost of tens of thousands of tax dollars when any 10 year old kid on the street can make this decision. Add to that the cost to Detert's campaign, which she apparently is now at a disadvantage because she can't get her message out because her campaign money is in a minimum of a sixty day limbo--assuming the FEC takes her advisory opinion request when her lawyers get it submitted.

Of course, she has to pay those lawyers out of campaign funds she doesn't have, just to add a little insult to injury.