The immensity of the complaint makes it sound like a punchline, but it’s no joke – a 425 page ethics complaint has been filed by former state representative Cynthia Davis, currently the Constitution Party’s candidate for Lt. Governor, detailing no less than 68 ethics violations revolving around money that was conspicuously “moved around” by partners at Regional Growth Consultants, a Democratic consulting company.
Basically, in order to allow large contributions to pour in from anonymous donors for direct mail campaigns, RGC would take money from “clients” (donors) for “services” (nothing) and would “donate” (funnel) the money to two outside “political action committees” (laundering operations) run by RGC Partner Danny Powell and his son John Powell, respectively, who would then “hire” (funnel the money back to) RGC to do direct mail campaigns for the candidate the original clients (donors) supported.
This process allowed for the names of the original clients/contributors to be kept off the government records they would have otherwise been listed on, hiding major donors behind a seedy cloak of anonymity.
Additionally, it may be one of the dumbest ideas ever executed by a political consulting company. It’s not as if there still isn’t any evidence to show the horribly unethical thing they’ve done. (Apparently there’s a few hundred pages of it.)
St. Charles County Democratic Chairman Tommy Roberts, also a partner at the company, would allegedly direct potentially large contributors to RGC for this purpose before acting as a go-between for the printing company as well.
It’s hard to understand how they got caught red-handed… they launched a devious plan without an actual devious plan. Taking that route is a three step process; it goes something like this:
- Start a PAC to run crappy fake campaigns.
- ???
- Lose all your campaigns anyway.
And that’s about as much control as Regional Growth Consultants had over this epic fail.
- B.H.
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