The committee behind Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign was fined $21,000 by the Federal Election Commission for mishandling financial contributions, according to a new report.
Freedom for All Americans, formerly known as Rand Paul for President, Inc., was hit with the penalty after the FEC found it did not refund $165,749 worth of campaign contributions or put them toward a different election, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal, which cited FEC documents that have not been made public. A campaign must take one of those two actions within 60 days of a party’s nomination.
The penalty followed a complaint from the Louisville Democratic Party’s former chairman, the late J. Russell Lloyd, which was filed in November 2016, according to a letter the FEC recently addressed and sent to Lloyd.
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The paper did not disclose how it came to possess the documents or when exactly the FEC fined the campaign committee.
“In the big picture, the FEC is legendary for not really penalizing anybody, so any penalty of significance from the FEC is noteworthy,” said Adav Noti, senior director and chief of staff for the Campaign Legal Center. “And $21,000 — although it’s not a bank-breaker for a presidential campaign, it’s not nothing, either.”
“It will be important to see whatever explanation the full file provides as to why the FEC dismissed those violations in 2021,” Noti added.
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The campaign committee denied violating federal election law, according to the documents. A spokesperson for Paul said the committee “filed honestly and returned all excess contributions all the way back in 2016.”
“Campaign regulations are Byzantine, but we have always attempted to comply. As do all campaigns, we hire teams of professionals to fill out thousands of forms,” the spokesperson said. “It is not uncommon for large national campaigns to have a missed deadline that is then rectified.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the FEC for more information about the reported fine.
