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The entrepreneurial spirit lives on within the Republican Party:
The former treasurer of a Republican Congressional fund-raising committee may have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars by submitting elaborately forged audit reports for five years using the letterhead of a legitimate auditing firm, a lawyer for the committee said Thursday.
Robert K. Kelner, a lawyer with Covington & Burling, who was brought in by the National Republican Congressional Committee to investigate accounting irregularities, said a new audit showed that the committee had $740,000 less on hand than it believed. Mr. Kelner said it was unclear whether that amount represented money siphoned off by the former treasurer, Christopher J. Ward.
Mr. Ward, who is under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had the authority to make transfers of committee money on his own, Mr. Kelner said.
He said an investigation with the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers had “found a pattern in which Mr. Ward would transfer funds by wire out of the N.R.C.C. to outside committees.” From those outside committees, Mr. Kelner said, money was then transferred to “personal and business accounts of Mr. Ward.”
Why is this completely unsurprising? Keep in mind that this happened during wartime and you know the difficulties of operating in wartime. More effort will be expended on tracking down Republican money than taxpayers money.
Fog of war, people!
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Perhaps the GOP will have to admit that Karma’s a bitch. Or, more likely, they’ll blame it on Bill Clinton.
If he can’t boost six figures without getting caught or bulldoze his way through it with blatant lies, he wasn’t cut out for Republican team anyways.
It’s a corollary to “it’s OK if you’re a Republican”:
It’s OK if you steal from a Democrat.
Stupid fooker: you steal from the gummint, not the party. The party’s there to help you steal from the gummint.
The Washing Post is reporting that Mr. Ward may have embezzled up to $1mil.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..components
Previously the NRCC stated $900,000 went missing; now they state $740,000. We won’t know how much Ward embezzled until he goes to court. My guess is that it will be at least $2mil, minimum. Don’t forget, we’re dealing with Repubeicans here.
Exactly. Anything less than $1 million is for pikers, and certainly won’t get you a Bush Rangers designation.
Ward treasurered any number of individual candidates’ campaign committees as well, and each of them is looking at its last few years’ “audits” askance.