The Corporate Money Never Went to the Candidates

Here’s another segment from that Situation Room interview that bears going over:

BLITZER: Did you have anything to do with raising these corporate funds?

DELAY: I certainly did. I went to fundraisers — and the corporate funds are legal, by the way. Raising corporate funds –

BLITZER: They’re legal to raise corporate funds, but I take it under Texas law and several other states, it’s not legal to give corporate funds to state politicians.

DELAY: That is true. And that did not happen.

BLITZER: Somehow these politicians got this money from the Republican Party.

DELAY: No, they didn’t. No. The corporate money — I was not involved in the legal transaction that John Colyandro and Jim Ellis did. They did a legal transaction that’s done by Democrats and Republicans, totally legal, totally legal, and has been done for years back in the days when you had soft and hard money.

What Blitzer and others are not getting is that the corporate money never went to the candidates. Here’s what happened: Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) wrote a check for $190,000 of corporate money and sent it the Republican National State Election Committee (RNSEC). In the days before campaign-finance reform at the RNSEC, they had dozens of lawyers and accountants whose sole job it was to make sure that corporate soft money and hard money always stayed in separate accounts. They were watching millions of dollars, trying to figure out where it could be legally used for state elections all over the country.

So TRMPAC sends this check for $190,000 of corporate money to RNSEC, whose lawyers and accountants put it in a separate account for corporate money, which cannot go to state elections in Texas, but which can go to state elections in states like California or Virginia. So they put that $190,000 into an account where it could be distributed to elections in those states.

The money that the RNSEC then distributed to candidates in Texas came out of a different account, which contained hard-money donations from individuals that could be used in Texas races. The whole point of having a RNSEC in the first place is to make these legal transactions for races all over the country. You might not like it. Ronnie Earle doesn’t like it. But that doesn’t make it illegal.

The bottom line is, the corporate money went into one account and RNSEC sent hard money from a separate account back to Texas. That’s not money-laundering. That’s the insane world of campaign-finance regulation.