Ickes and ACT and Hillary's campaign

Amanda Carpenter:

A longtime Clinton advisor was at the helm of a George Soros-backed Democratic fundraising group when it illegally spent campaign cash during the 2004 presidential election.

The group, America Coming Together, signed an agreement with the Federal Election Commission to pay a $755,000 fine in order to settle charges ACT had violated campaign finance law. The FEC released details of the agreement on August 29.

This settlement was the third largest penalty ever paid to the FEC.

In the run-up to the November 2004 election, ACT raised approximately $137 million. According to the FEC, ACT improperly classified $70 million in receipts in “administrative costs” that were attributable to clearly identified federal candidates.

Campaign finance law, which is enforced by the FEC, regulates how money can be raised and spent in federal elections. Most of ACT’s 2004 election activities were designed to defeat President George Bush and elect Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) as President. The group wrongly marked many of those expenses as get-out-the-vote activities, which are not as strictly regulated like money spent to elect or defeat a specific candidate.

Changes made to campaign finance law in 2001 mandate that money for federal elections must be raised in smaller amounts than money contributed for get-out-the-vote activities. Therefore, because ACT spent non-federal money, which is easier to raise, on federal candidates, candidates supported by ACT, like Kerry, had an unfair advantage in the 2004 election.

The conciliation agreement reached between ACT and FEC stated that ACT had “failed to account for millions of dollars in federal contributions that constituted direct support for John Kerry (often due their opposition to the candidacy of George Bush)” causing the group to “severely understate” the amount of money ACT claimed to have spent.

Deeply involved in these illegal activities was Harold Ickes, a Democratic operative who was a senior aide to President Bill Clinton, helped elect Hillary Clinton to the Senate and now advises her bid for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008.

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The Ickes connection with ACT is just another questionable campaign finance character in the Clinton camp which the past week has featured the mysterious Mr. Hsu, who turned himself in to face his 15 year old swindling conviction sentence. Twelve years later and McCain-Feingold later the Democrats still cannot win with legal contributions and in 2004, they could not win with illegal ones either. This is a very inconvenient scandal for Democrats who have been showing excitement over the toilet room signals of a Republican Senator as scandalous. The media needs to challenge whether Ickes should be participating in Hillary's current campaign and what that says about the campaign finance ethics of Hillary's efforts.

What is interesting about both the Hsu and the ACT issues is that they were not the product of GOP opposition research, but of the ponderous efforts of the campaign finance bureaucracy and some good old fashioned reporting by the Wall Street Journal and LA Times. It is enough to make you think that journalism is not completely hopeless.

Instapundit also looks at the problems with campaign finance regulations. It is more about the appearance of regulation.