THE TRUTH ABOUT
CHRIS MCDANIEL
CHRIS MCDANIEL CAMPAIGN STRATEGY:
Raise money illegally, hide it from voters, then lie about it
May 11, 2023
Chris McDaniel has again filed an incomplete and incoherent report of the amounts and sources of funding for his campaign.This comes after McDaniel’s campaign last month said he was returning legally questionable large donations from a Virginia dark-money nonprofit, and shutting down his PAC through which the donations flowed to his campaign. ...
McDaniel, a four-term state senator who has twice run unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate, filed only a cover sheet for his campaign finance report, failing to itemize donations or spending over $200 as required by state law. ... McDaniel’s campaign and PAC reports to date make it impossible to know for sure exactly how much money he has raised, has on hand or from whence it came....
McDaniel had also created the Hold the Line PAC. Its public filings and subsequent explanations and amended reports from McDaniel and others have been confounding. Hold the Line initially failed to list the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars it claimed to have collected, and its reports have had amounts and dates that don’t add up. For instance, Hold the Line reported having raised hundreds of thousands of dollars the year before McDaniel legally registered it with the secretary of state’s office, and failed to list the source of that money as required by law.
A spokeswoman for McDaniel’s campaign last month said McDaniel was confident he would prevail in court on any challenge to his finances, but was returning $460,000 to the American Exceptionalism Institute “to avoid a protracted legal fight with the establishment.”
Hosemann’s complaint includes claims McDaniel’s Hold the Line PAC and campaign violated Mississippi law that prohibits a corporation from donating more than $1,000 in a single year to a candidate or PAC. The PAC reported a $237,000 donation in August from the Alexandria, Virginia, nonprofit corporation American Exceptionalism Institute. His Hold the Line PAC was the largest donor to McDaniel’s campaign, contributing $465,000 of the $710,000 McDaniel’s campaign reported raising last year. ... McDaniel, through a campaign spokeswoman, said he has done nothing wrong, but will be returning a $237,500 contribution from what has been described as a “dark money” nonprofit corporation in Virginia that dumps millions of anonymously sourced funds into campaigns nationwide.
McDaniel registered his PAC with secretary of state in June of 2022. But Hold the Line’s first finance report showed it had a cash balance for the end of 2021 of $473,962. After questions from Mississippi Today, McDaniel said the PAC made a “clerical error,” and the PAC filed an amended report. But the amended report still showed a cash balance for 2021 — the year before it was created — of $236,981, as did a third amended report the PAC filed that same day last month. ... Neither Tardif nor Datwyler addressed where at least $236,981 in unaccounted for cash in the PAC came from.
The secretary of state’s office, records show, has forwarded the complaint to the criminal investigations division of the attorney general’s office.
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