There must be a special place in Hell for those who create FEC reports. Or perhaps that is the Hell. Anyhow, this is what your intrepid blogger found by perusing the April Quarterly report for the Daschle campaign war chest. This is actual campaign money (you know, A Lot Of People Supporting Tom Daschle), not DASHPAC. You too can access this information by going here and clicking on the PDF file for the April report at the top. WARNING: It's a big flippin' file. For poor suckers like me who are still on dial up, it's a loooong download.
Since the beginning of 2005 former Daschle campaign manager Steve Hildebrand has personally been paid $2696.63 by the Daschle campaign that supposedly isn't campaigning anymore. Part of this is $809.56 on Valentine's Day. Couple this with the $1518.08 he received the same day from DASHPAC, and there was a lot of Daschle love going out to Steve Hildebrand this past Valentine's Day. You can find these payments on pages 20 and 46 of the PDF document. Hildebrand's consulting company was paid by the Daschle campaign chest a total of $3000 in March 2005 (three separate payments of $1000). You can find these expenditures on pages 31-32 of the report. Add all this up with the DASHPAC money that I noted below, and Mr. Hildebrand and his consulting interests have been paid a total of $13,214.81 by Tom Daschle from January to the end of March 2005.
As I also noted below, there is nothing necessarily unethical about this. Perhaps these are payments for services rendered during the campaign. But it certainly raises questions when those who run "independent" political groups that do nothing other than attack John Thune are actually on the payroll of Tom Daschle. Daschle has left a possible political future open for himself. Perhaps he is just never going to stop running for office, and he is still paying people to run his permanent campaign.
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