Former Ron Paul Advisers Slated To Go On Trial
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Three top campaign advisers to 2012 presidential candidate Ron Paul who are scheduled to go on trial this week have lost their fight to get charges of conspiracy to cover up campaign payments to a former state senator dismissed.
Judge John Jarvey denied the defense team's motion to dismiss the case in an order filed Wednesday, setting it up to go to trial as scheduled in federal court in Des Moines on Tuesday.
Paul's 2012 campaign chairman Jesse Benton, campaign manager John Tate and deputy manager Dimitri Kesari are charged with conspiracy to cover up $73,000 in campaign payments to former Iowa Sen. Kent Sorenson, who dropped his support for Michelle Bachmann and endorsed Paul six days before the Iowa caucuses. Federal prosecutors say the men secretly agreed to pay Sorenson for his endorsement and attempted to hide the payments by funneling them through a video production company.
The three also are charged with causing false campaign contribution reports to be filed to the Federal Election Commission and participating in a false statement scheme. Benton and Tate are charged with causing the campaign to file false records of the payments; Kesari was convicted of that charge last year.
Attorneys for the men had argued that federal law only requires campaigns to declare payments to vendors and not track whether the money goes to a subcontractor beyond that. In a motion to dismiss the case filed Tuesday, Tate's attorney, David Warrington, cited a case involving Ready For Hillary, a political action committee established before Clinton entered the current race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Allegations were made by Clinton opponents who formed a Stop Hillary PAC in January 2014 that Ready For Hillary didn't properly report a $136,000 payment to a group called Friends of Hillary — Clinton's 2006 senatorial campaign committee and the successor to her 2008 presidential campaign — for the right to use an email list of supporters. The PAC said it paid a third-party vendor to obtain the email list and disclosed the vendor name as the payee instead of the Friends of Hillary group.
An FEC attorney recommended further investigation into whether the PAC reported the payment as required by law. The six-member board voted Feb. 1, 2015, but the 3-3 tie meant there were insufficient votes to investigate further.
Warrington claimed that and similar decisions in other cases are enough to demonstrate that the Paul staffers' payments to a vendor which in turn were handed over to Sorensen are not considered unlawful.
The government's attorney, Richard Pilger, said last week "the FEC's failure by a tie vote to approve enforcement actions proposed by its Office of General Counsel has no precedential impact on this criminal case."
The men have said they believe the prosecution is politically motivated and that they are another example of the federal government going after tea party-backed conservatives.
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