Republican Senator Throws Stones in a Glass House

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), senior Republican on the Finance Committee, today voted against Tim Geithner during the panel’s vote on the Treasury Department nominee. From Grassley’s statement:

With this nomination, all of us who serve on the Finance Committee also had to consider how significant it would be for the head of our nation’s tax administration and tax policy to pay his own taxes without violations. The Treasury Secretary is in charge of the IRS, and must set a good example. … I received a message yesterday from a constituent in Dubuque expressing concern about this nomination. The constituent wrote, “If the man cannot handle his own finances, how is he going to handle the country’s?”

Someone should remind Grassley that he’s not immune from the accounting “mistakes” to which Geithner has confessed.

Grassley’s political fundraising committee, Hawkeye PAC, settled with the FEC two months ago to remedy “the inadvertent omission of several disbursements” on one of its 2006 contribution reports. (The settlement letter is in PDF form, but can be viewed by searching the FEC’s website.)

The FEC’s official letter on the case states that “when it recognized the deficiencies in compliance, [Grassley’s PAC] immediately did an internal audit that reviewed all reports and records from 2002 to the present and developed financial procedures to maintain compliance.” The PAC paid a $1,000 penalty to the FEC and agreed to appoint a compliance specialist to ensure it complied with campaign finance rules.

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