The fact is sometimes obscured by the sheer volume of scandal associated with the Trump campaign, that there remain other issues with the American electoral system.
One of the other issues with a lower profile than, say, the Russia scandal, is highlighted by a new report from The Daily Beast, which explains that the campaign committee of prominent California Republican member of the U.S. House Devin Nunes received a letter this Wednesday from the Federal Election Commission over possibly illegal campaign contributions.
The letter requests “information essential to full public disclosure” of the donations in question, which include donations from two individuals who seemingly went over their allowed amount and a donation from a company local to Nunes’ Congressional district that broke the law regarding donations from companies.
Harris Lee Cohen is one of the two individuals who have seemingly gone over their allowed limit for campaign contributions, having contributed $1,500 first in July of last year and then again in November. (The limit for an individual’s contributions to a campaign committee is $2,700.) Cohen works as general manager of Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, California.
The other individual to have seemingly gone over the allowed limit for campaign contributions from individuals is lobbyist Jeffrey J. Kimbell, whose firm focuses on providing “legislative, regulatory and policy solutions to clients in the life sciences community.” Kimbell went over the maximum allowed individual contribution to a campaign committee via three separate donations of $1,000, $1,700, and $300. The latter two donations came in on December 14 of last year while the first came in on June 26.
Kimbell’s firm has carried out lobbying work for bills sponsored by Nunes in the past, including the Ambulance Medicare Budget and Operations Act of 2017 and the Comprehensive Operations, Sustainability, and Transport Act of 2017.
As for the business to have broken the laws covering donations from such entities, the farming company Stone Land Company contributed $10,000 to Nunes’ campaign committee last November. The FEC prohibits contributions from “corporations and labor organizations unless made from separate segregated funds established by the corporations and labor organizations.”
This issue is hardly the only one Nunes has faced scrutiny over.
He withdrew himself from the main Russia investigation of the House Intelligence Committee, which he leads, after it came out last year that he’d been cooperating with the White House in his investigative efforts.
That investigation, led by Republican Congressman Mike Conaway in Nunes’ absence, recently began to end, with Republicans on the committee announcing they’d concluded the interview portion of their inquiry.
As for Nunes, he carried on with his own investigation, and came out recently with a report alleging abuses of surveillance power at the FBI. That report has been widely contested and seen as little more than a political stunt.
Devin Nunes’ Congressional seat is considered by the Cook Political Report to be a “Solid Republican” stronghold, meaning that he seems to be clear of the seemingly impending Democratic wave in the midterm elections. Democrat Conor Lamb managed a victory in a recent Pennsylvania Congressional district that Trump won by about 20 percent, so Republicans should no doubt be worried.
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