Breaking The Law...

John McCain's campaign spending is breaking the law. He elected for public funding when his campaign was having trouble. But now that he is the presumptive nominee, he is, by his campaign's own admission, around $4 million over his legal spending limit.

Why is this important? According to the FEC's law, McCain has broken the law and can be jailed for up to 5 years if convicted.

The DNC filed a complaint today with the FEC you can read here. But essentially, McCain signed a candidate agreement in August of 2007, seeking a certificate of eligibility for matching funds with the FEC. On December 20, the Commission announced it had certified McCain to receive federal matching funds. But checks for matching funds generally don't get written until February or March, and the cash strapped McCain campaign needed money before that.

So on January 31 2008, the McCain campaign disclosed that it had obtained a $4 million line of credit, and had already drawn $2,971,697 of that credit.

The laws covering public financing require that you can only spend $54 million during the primary, and McCain's reports say that as of January 31, 2008 he had spent $49,600,000 -- which means he's probably already over that limit. So to nobody's surprise, on February 6, he sent a letter to the Commission announcing that his campaign was withdrawing from participation in the federal primary election fund program.

Well that would all be fine and dandy except as McCain well knows, you can't just wave a magic wand and do that.

McCain is saying that Howard Dean and John Kerry also withdrew from public financing after they applied for it, but both of them pulled out before certification and they had a vote of the FEC board which allowed them to do it. Further, they hadn't materially benefited from being in the public financing system -- and McCain has. McCain was able to get free ballot access in Kentucky, Montana, Ohio and Delaware because of his participation. And without grass roots support -- which McCain does not have -- gathering signatures would have cost him a pretty penny.

Further, the law quite carefully stipulates that if McCain's loan was obtained by pledging money he was to receive from public financing as collateral, he can't opt out of the system. And as Mark Schmidt says in his analysis, McCain's convoluted tapdance around that subject seems like an attempt to flout the law without actually breaking it. It's too cute by half. Which is why the FEC sent a letter to McCain (PDF) saying that he can only ask for a ruling to let him out of public financing, and in the mean time they want some answers about the loan.

(via Huffington Post)

I just did my part to stop McCain from breaking the law by signing the official FEC complaint against him.

Please help out by adding your name here:

McCain FEC Petition