Mick Mulvaney Used Old Campaign Funds to Cover Interest Payments on His Loans
What the nation’s top financial consumer watchdog did is legal. It’s also ironic.
LACHLAN MARKAY
04.30.18 5:27 AM ET
When White House budget director Mick Mulvaney repaid personal loans to his state senate campaign in September, he was digging himself out of a bit of a financial hole.
Mulvaney had loaned his South Carolina campaign thousands of dollars to cover interest payments on other six-figure loans that he used to finance his state-level campaigns before being elected to Congress in 2010.
It’s a problematic situation in which many Americans find themselves: borrowing money to pay debt service on other borrowed money. But for Mulvaney, the situation was particularly ironic: Two months after he repaid his personal loans to his state senate campaign, he was tapped to be the nation’s top financial consumer watchdog—an office that has tried to help consumers avoid just those sorts of debt traps.
In September 2017, before he was appointed acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he quietly transferred $32,544 from his congressional campaign account—essentially, unspent donations to his House runs—to his old state senate campaign.
About half of that money went toward repaying personal loans that Mulvaney had made to his state senate campaign. The rest paid off debt owed to a South Carolina bank from which he had drawn six-figure lines of credit with interest rates as high as 6.5 percent. Beginning in 2011, Mulvaney had begun lending his state campaign money to make interest payments on those loans, one of which he refinanced in 2014.
Mulvaney’s post-congressional campaign expenditures have drawn criticism for other reasons. In March, the American Democracy Legal Fund, a Democratic-leaning legal advocacy group, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Mulvaney was illegally using leftover campaign funds to pay personal expenses.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/mick-mulvaney-used-old-campaign-funds-to-cover-interest-payments-on-his-loans?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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