Herschel, Grifty Walker

Wait that headline doesn't make sense.

Herschel Walker — Hey! Stop throwing stuff at me, this is real news! — appears to have been up to some some mind-blowingly grifty shenanigans during his failed 2022 run against Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) last year, according to reporting from the Daily Beast Wednesday . The Beast acquired a bunch of emails between Walker and a company owned by a longtime family friend of Walker's, billionaire industrial mogul Dennis Washington, who made it big in molybdenum and copper mining in Montana in the '70s and then expanded into industrialist stuff. (His novelty record, "Big In Molybdenum," flopped, however.)

In March 2022, the Beast reports, Walker emailed an executive for one of Washington's companies, conveniently named The Washington Corporations, to ask for money, which candidates do all the time, no big whoop. Except, as reporter Roger Sollenberger explains, candidates definitely don't make the kind of ask Walker did, because it's almost certainly illegal as fuck:

Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Emails obtained by The Daily Beast—and verified as authentic by a person with knowledge of the exchanges—show that Walker asked Washington to wire $535,200 directly to that undisclosed company, HR Talent, LLC.

And the emails reveal that not only did Washington complete Walker’s wire requests, he was under the impression that these were, in fact, political contributions

In the best possible circumstances, legal experts told The Daily Beast, the emails suggest violations of federal fundraising rules; in the worst case, they could be an indication of more serious crimes, such as wire fraud.

The story is very careful to point out that even though he'd never run for office before, Walker was very well briefed on campaign finance rules from the time he started running in 2021. In one of the emails to Washington, Walker even explained the limits that could be given to his campaign and to his super PAC, "34N22," so he can't very well claim he was just a simple country millionaire former football player who'd like to be a werewolf maybe. 

While we do have to talk about donation amounts and such, we won't be going into all the financial ins and outs, because 1) that's already in the Daily Beast story, and also 2) that would be Math.

Sollenberger adds that after Washington's people were informed by a third party that the money that had been wired to Walker's company couldn't actually be used for political purposes, an executive emailed Walker to ask if the money sent to HR Talent could be redirected to the super PAC instead, but that Walker "appears to have dismissed" those worries. The story now includes an update, noting that the day after it ran,

 a spokesperson for Washington said Walker had refunded the money but did not respond to questions about when that happened.

Look, everything's fine here, we're fine. How are you?

When Walker was preparing for the runoff election against Raphael Warnock, a November 29 email from Tim McHugh, executive VP for the Washington Corporations, notes that after McHugh had spoken with Walker on the phone about a new $100,000 contribution to the campaign that Walker had requested, McHugh was informed that

"any funds sent to the HR Talent account cannot legally be used for political purposes. Political contributions must go to either the Team Herschel or 34N22 accounts. [...] We will need your assistance to get the prior contributions made to the HR Talent account in March corrected."

Sollenberger decodes that for us:

Walker was not allowed to solicit donations for the super PAC in excess of federal limits, which this amount of money explicitly was. But that was not McHugh’s concern; he was worried about the hundreds of thousands of dollars his boss had wired to HR Talent in March.

But instead of addressing those concerns, Walker wrote back with an email detailing how Washington and his two sons, Kyle and Kevin, could donate $10,800 to his campaign, his recount effort, and his super PAC, with the remainder to go to his company, HR Talent. Yes, again, right after McHugh said hey, I hear that can't be used for your campaign. 

As Sollenberger 'splains,

The numbers suggest that Walker had worked out a $100,000 arrangement with each Washington, with 95 percent of their contributions going to Walker’s company instead of the super PAC. But while Dennis Washington’s $5,800 campaign donations from the time do appear in FEC records, the $95,400 never hit the super PAC’s account. Kyle and Kevin Washington did not donate any money after the November emails.

Long story short: There's a lot of hinky stuff in the emails, and campaign finance experts told Sollenberger over and over that they'd never seen anything so insanely grifty:

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, called the arrangement “jaw-dropping.” Jordan Libowitz, communications director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said if Walker “used the campaign to funnel money into his own business, that’s one of the biggest campaign finance crimes I’ve ever heard of.” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director of Documented, remarked that the exchanges were “stunning and, to my knowledge, without parallel in recent history.”

“Campaign finance laws are designed to prevent massive under-the-table payments like those described here,” Fischer said. “While we don’t have all the facts, these emails point to highly illegal, potentially even criminal activity.”

Libowitz even went so far as to suggest that Walker's scheme appears to have out-Trumped Donald Trump, because while Trump used campaign donations at his own businesses over and over, there were actual goods and services being purchased at the going market rates (though perhaps on the high side of the going rate, ahem). “Here, the money isn’t being spent by the campaign on Herschel’s businesses," Libowitz told Sollenberger. "The money never even goes to the campaign. It just goes straight to him.”

But wait, there's more!

Ghosh, of the Campaign Legal Center, agreed that Walker appears to have violated campaign finance laws, calling the scheme “$500,000 of grift.”

“It appears to be a fake campaign solicitation, designed to just profit personally from someone. That’s brazen in a way that’s off the charts,” he said.

On top of that, Ghosh pointed out that campaign law requires candidates to report all their sources of income, so Walker's failure to list HR Talent LLC in his financial statements appears to violate the law too. Further, Ghosh said, if Walker had misled Washington about where the money was going — as certainly seems to be the case — "Then we’re in the world of just defrauding somebody."

“Sounds a lot like wire fraud if the money didn’t make it to the campaign or super PAC,” Ghosh said. “And the fact they tried to do it again shows they’re trying to squeeze this billionaire.”

So what happens now? That would be up to federal prosecutors, who we assume pay attention to the news. And golly, wouldn't it be something if more on this came out, like with all the stuff on Clarence Thomas that started turning up after ProPublica did some digging?

If this does turn into an investigation, and an investigation turns into an arrest, we have two words of advice for the federal agents assigned to bring Mr. Walker in: Silver bullets.

[ Daily Beast ]

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