McDaniel Campaign Manager: Tornado Ate Docs For Finance Report

Youtube photo of state Sen. Melanie Sojourner (R-MS), campaign manager for state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-MS).
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Chris McDaniel’s campaign manager, state Sen. Melanie Sojourner (R), is blaming an EF-2 tornado for why she had not filed a campaign finance report before a Jan. 31 deadline.

“I lost the overwhelming majority of my paperwork, bank statements, records, you name it,” Sojourner said in reference to a tornado that touched down in the Kingston, Mississippi region, according to the Natchez Democrat. “I even filed for an extension on my taxes for the first time ever, because I just don’t have a lot of that information.”

Sojourner said her home office was damaged because of the tornado and that she told the Mississippi secretary of State’s office some of that.

“I just hadn’t expedited it because there was nothing that was ever said to me ‘You have until X date to do it,'” Sojourner said. “I just kept telling myself I would do that when I sat down later in the summer to do my taxes. It wasn’t like I sad ‘I’m not going to do this,’ but I just didn’t have all the records to appropriately file it.”

Sojourner has been fined $500 by the Department of Finance and Administration and been warned that she could have her pay cut as a state senator over her failure to file the campaign report.

Sojourner suggested she had been unfairly targeted.

“I’ve been talking to people who say, ‘I’ve been here for years and never filled out one of those,” Sojourner said. “They’re doing whatever they can to target a few of us right now, but I can’t help what happened, and I’m going to go ahead and get it filed.”

(H/t: Y’all Politics)

(Photo credit: Youtube)

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