MS Today: “The list of McDaniel’s legally questionable maneuvers with campaign money is lengthy. But here are a couple of big points for starters:
A state PAC McDaniel created received $475,000 from a secretive Virginia dark-money nonprofit corporation. His PAC then funneled $465,000 of it to his campaign.
State law limits such corporate donations to $1,000 a year to a candidate or PAC. So the donation was $474,000 over the legal limit.
McDaniel’s PAC initially hid some of these transactions with incomplete, inaccurate reporting to the secretary of state’s office. But eventually, after questions from Mississippi Today, he first chalked it up to “clerical errors.”
Then, eventually, McDaniel said Mississippi’s campaign finance laws are improper but he doesn’t have time to mount a legal challenge, so his campaign returned the money to his PAC. McDaniel said his PAC then returned the money to the dark money group, and he shut down the PAC.
But, by his own reporting, McDaniel’s defunct PAC did not return $15,000 of the over-state-limits money, and has offered no accounting for what happened to it….
Oddly, McDaniel during his long tenure as a state senator loudly championed stricter campaign finance laws and transparency for the public on sources of political money. But his PAC and campaign finances mark the largest secret and over the legal limit donation to a state campaign in Mississippi.”