USA Today: Senate candidate repays campaign for family trip
Campaign finance rules allow a campaign to pay for family members to attend a campaign event, but do not allow a campaign to pay for a family vacation, said Larry Noble of the Campaign Legal Center watchdog group and a former general counsel to the Federal Election Commission.
“The question comes down to whether it was a vacation, or whether it was campaign- or office-related,” Noble said. “The fact that they called it a vacation is pretty good evidence it was a vacation.”
If the Federal Election Commission were to investigate and determine the plane tickets should not have been paid for by Stutzman’s campaign, his later reimbursement would not erase the violation, but would be seen as a mitigating factor, Noble said.