Sarah Palin’s leadership committee, SarahPAC, is now getting some annoying questions from people other than the media — namely, the Federal Election Commission.
In an August 19 letter to SarahPAC, the FEC asked for more information on several irregularities in the PAC’s mid-year report — mostly consisting of failures to itemize on expenditures of certain sizes. In addition, it appears that SarahPAC neglected to properly file as a multi-candidate PAC, and thus made potentially illegal donations to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), with the checks weighing in beyond the limit for a non-multicandidate PAC.
It appears that this is probably not a matter of corruption. Rather, it may simply involve a level of negligence and ineptitude beyond the norm. For example, the FEC notes that the two checks to Murkowski and McCain were filed as being for the 2009 primary election, which does not exist. The FEC simply pointed out the error, and is counting them towards the 2010 campaign.
FEC spokesperson Julia Queen could not comment as to the severity or lack thereof, but could only explain the process of how the FEC’s report look over all the filings. “If there is an appearance of a possible violation of the Act, the committee has 30 days to respond,” said Queen. “And if any committee fails to respond adequately or fails to respond at all, the commission may take additional action, but that would be part of the enforcement process and I’m not allowed to discuss it.”
Messages left at SarahPAC were not returned.
