Campaign Finance Board rules against Kelliher campaign

The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board has fined Speaker of the House Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s gubernatorial campaign committee $9,000 and the Minnesota DFL Party $15,000 for intentionally violating Minnesota campaign laws.

In a ruling issued today (PDF), the board found that Kelliher’s campaign committee violated prohibitions against soliciting and accepting “earmarked” contributions when campaign officials purposely solicited, accepted and transferred contributions to the DFL Party to benefit Kelliher’s committee.

It also found that the party violated the earmarking law by accepting those contributions, and that both the campaign committee and the party violated a law prohibiting circumvention of the earmarking law by redirecting the contributions through the party.

The board fined Kelliher’s campaign committee $1,500 for accepting earmarked contributions and $7,500 for circumventing the the earmarking law. The party was fined $7,500 for violating the earmarking law and $7,500 for the circumvention.

Both the campaign committee and the party must pay the penalties within 30 days or face further disciplinary action.

An investigation was launched last month after the Minnesota Republican Party asked the Campaign Finance Board to investigate whether Kelliher and her committee broke the law when campaign donors gave money to the DFL Party and the money was used to give her access to a DFL database of voters.

Seven donors gave a total of $7,500 to the party, and those contributions were used as Kelliher’s payments for access to the database. (Kelliher subsequently paid for access to the database, using campaign funds, and some of the contributions to the party were returned to donors.)

The arrangement was approved last August by Andy O’Leary, the DFL’s executive director, who said he believed that a previous opinion by the Campaign Finance Board indicated that such an arrangement was acceptable.

The matter came to light in December after another candidate for governor, state Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, asked the DFL Party if he could use the same process. That’s when party officials realized that the deal likely violated campaign law.

The Republican Party subsequently filed a complaint with the Campaign Finance Board, which met Tuesday to look into the matter.

The communications director for another DFL candidate for governor, former state Rep. Matt Entenza, applauded the board’s action in a statement this afternoon.

“What we have seen in the DFL’s behavior amounts to an ‘inside job’ that’s unfair to all the other campaigns that played by the rules,” Bridget Cusick said. “… The party leadership still has a lot of explaining to do to those candidates who have not been privy to their sweetheart treatment.”