Indian gaming interests and PAC contributions

I'm still in correspondence with the FEC public affairs office about some of the oddities I found with regard to the 6th congressional district April quarterly filings. I thought I'd update what I've figured out so far.

Apparently -- I didn't know this -- Indian nations are not covered by the standard rules about organizations/corporations which contribute to political campaigns. So they don't need to form PACs (though they can if they want), nor do they need to report their contributions to the FEC. As far as I can make out, they're treated as if they're individuals. Here's more detail from a site that repackages and sells FEC filing info. (This places the Abramoff scandal in better context. I follow national news reasonably closely, I'm surprised I don't remember coming across this before.)

So the reason that the FEC didn't put the contributions from the Indian nations to Krinkie in their database under PAC contributions is that they aren't really PAC contributions, and the Krinkie campaign shouldn't have listed them as such.

There's stil the question of the non-Indian contributions to Krinkie and the odd Tinklenberg discrepancies, though.

posted by DK @ 3:02 PM permalink