Mia’s Money Matters: Love Campaign to Keep Contested Funds Amid Objection

Rep. Mia Love’s re-election campaign will hold onto much of the nearly $1.2 million her opponent says she raised improperly, shifting it to the general election from a primary that never happened, her campaign said Tuesday. The move came as Ben McAdams, Love’s opponent in the hotly contested midterm election, demanded she forfeit all the money, which has been the subject of a Federal Elections Commission inquiry.

“We followed the rules, and we followed the law, and they raised money illegally,” said Alyson Heyrend, McAdams’s communications director.

Dave Hanson, Love’s communications director, brushed aside such assertions as “crap.”“We don’t take our direction from the McAdams campaign,” he said. At issue is $1,153,624 Love raised and classified as primary election funds for her 4th District seat in Utah.

If the FEC accepts the Love campaign’s explanation, it could create a precedent for candidates in Utah and Connecticut to bypass fundraising limits for individual contributors, said Brendan Fischer, an attorney at the non-partisan nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “This appears to be an example of a candidate adopting an aggressive view of the law in order to raise as much money as possible and expecting that the FEC will let them get away with it,” he said.

Read the full article.