Republican Election Scandals

Accepted tens of thousands of dollars in illegal donations including $27k from an ineligible GOP candidate during the 2022 election and was forced to pay over $36k to settle a campaign finance claim filed against them

Illegally spent a total of $12,500 in campaign funds to pay for his lodging at a home owned by fellow Rep. Darrell Issa [R-CA] in violation of federal law

Stole $5,950 from his campaign by improperly charging it for "staff lodging" at his personal home even though no staff actually lodged there

Stole more than $30 million from at least 150 foreign investors over a yearslong period by falsely promising them green cards and a pathway to US citizenship and used the money to fund a lavish lifestyle and pay for illegal campaign contributions to Republican politicians

Forged "rows" of voter names, addresses and signatures on petitions he filed to qualify for the 2024 Republican primary in Arizona while also championing himself as an "election integrity warrior" who routinely espoused voter fraud conspiracy theories

Conspired with disgraced former Congressman George Santos to submit fraudulent campaign finance reports that falsely asserted he had loaned his campaign $500,000 because it made him look wealthier than he actually was and helped him get donor funding he very likely otherwise wouldn't have received

Fraudulently listed a vacation rental she didn't live at as her official address on campaign filings

Illegally ran for county commissioner in a district she didn't live in by fraudulently asserting that she lived there

Illegally ran for county commissioner in a district she didn't live in by fraudulently asserting that she lived there

Spread fake political endorsements with the intent to harm another politician's prospects in a local election over a series of online posts and advertisements

Lied about living in the district he was later elected to represent on candidacy forms that he swore under oath under were accurate

Violated multiple campaign finance rules during his 2022 campaign and then stonewalled the state Ethics Commission when they demanded he hand over all "financial or accounting documents" from his campaign resulting in the commission going to court to subpoena the records

Illegally ran for local office and voted in a district she didn't reside in by fraudulently attesting that she lived there

Cast three ballots in other people's names in a general election and in one other person's name in a primary election held in 2021

Spent more than $157,000 in campaign money on personal expenses including $1,200 at a strip club, luxury clothes, cosmetics and multiple "opaque" checks and wire transfers that couldn't be properly accounted for

Falsely reported that he had loaned his campaign $320k and took an additional $700k line of credit on campaign finance forms he submitted in an apparent attempt to make potential challengers think that he had vastly more money in his campaign account than he actually did

Diverted more than $25,000 in campaign contributions to an entity that he was the sole proprietor of and was located at his home address by falsely claiming the money was used to pay rent on office space for his political campaign

Stole over $132,000 from multiple political accounts to pay for vacations with his family, housing costs and personal credit card statements by siphoning money from a loosely regulated political account that prosecutors alleged he used as his own "unregulated slush fund" into his own pocket

Illegally voted in nine elections between 2008 and 2011 while he was on probation for a prior felony conviction and ineligible to vote in Georgia while also having hypocritically spread baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and was later fined $5,000 and given a public reprimand by the judge overseeing his case

Fraudulently claimed a 5-by-5-foot closet-sized space he rented for $5 a month was his official residence in order to run for office in a district he didn't actually live in

Funneled at least $107,885 worth of campaign contributions into his personal accounts which he used to fund trips to Las Vegas, Napa Valley and other locations by creating a sham charity called the “United Latino Foundation” and enlisting his mother and close friend to help him transfer the money

Illegally transferred $91,000 from his campaign fund and a nonprofit organization to a PAC supporting his candidacy to help his failed 2016 bid for US Congress and then hid the transactions from the FEC

Forged thousands of fake signatures over hundreds of petitions his third-party company conducted that the State AG charged were full of “obvious fraud” and done in such a “sophomoric” way that he misspelled people's names and cities and had signatures of people who were dead or had moved and then submitted them to candidates who contracted his services and proceeded to inadvertently submit the fraudulent petition signatures to election officials

Illegally transferred $82.5 million from his state political action committee to a super PAC supporting his Presidential bid in violation of a federal campaign finance law that prohibits candidates from spending money that was obtained by people and groups not subject to strict federal requirements

Spent $17,303 in campaign funds on personal expenses including family vacations, a professional baseball game, $2,400 worth of clothing and his children's cellphone bills and also failed to provide proper documentation for over $53,000 worth of meals he charged at taxpayers' expense

Defrauded a donor who gave him $535,200 to use on his campaign which he diverted to his personal business accounts instead and broke campaign finance laws by not disclosing it in a scheme multiple campaign finance experts called “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping”

Stole $159k from his election campaign and spent it on personal expenses by routing funds through a political consulting firm that in turn paid him over a series of transactions

Refused to publicly release a final report his own staff spent 10,000 hours on that debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories because it didn't back up his claim that the election was rife with fraud after he publicly claimed he had found "serious vulnerabilities" in the voting system which wasn't true

Spent over $2 million in taxpayer dollars investigating ludicrous claims of voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election and quietly closed the investigation after failing to find any credible instances of fraud

Illegally spent over $100,000 in campaign contributions on personal expenses and then tried to cover it up by filing numerous false tax returns

Illegally accepted over $25,000 in campaign contributions from a single family member far exceeding the $5,600 legal limit per person

Repeatedly injected himself into special counsel John Durham's political investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia scandal in order to help Trump and discredit his detractors which led to his second in command resigning in protest and another taking a new job outside of the investigation

Illegally submitted dozens of phony voter registrations, absentee ballot requests and absentee ballots from members of the Vietnamese community in her district in the 2020 Iowa Republican primary in an attempt to help her husband Jeremy Taylor's campaign for the US House

Illegally coordinated with the leader of a Republican state PAC to pay an opposition research firm $52,000 to investigate the Democratic candidate for governor in violation of state law barring PACs from working with local and state political parties

Filled out and submitted eight absentee ballots for unwitting voters without their knowledge or consent by taking advantage of his position on a local elections board to access their voter information

Suspiciously listed 37 campaign expenses on purchases like a hotel stay in Miami and other travel expenses as costing $199.99 -- one cent below the legally binding $200 threshold that required itemized receipts -- on his campaign finance forms

Voted using his former invalid address instead of the one he actually lived at in a different county 60 miles away in the 2022 primary, general and U.S. Senate runoff elections

Twice voted from a county he wasn't registered to vote in while keeping his primary residence in another county in violation of state law while also being a vocal law & order candidate who subscribed to the conspiracy theory that there was fraud in the 2020 election

Used an illegal ID card he made that implied he was a state employee to vote in multiple elections

Forged signatures on at least nine absentee voter applications for people who were unaware he was submitting the request and lied to the county clerk by attesting he had permission to deliver the applications

Used $1,929.07 in campaign funds to pay for 11 months' worth of dues to gain "unlimited access" to a private social and dining club located in Texas

Spent $3,147.06 in campaign funds to pay for an extravagant dinner at a private social and dining club that the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics reported was likely a personal expense and not a fundraising event as he claimed

Spent roughly $100,000 in campaign donations on personal expenses that included a down payment on a home, luxury cars and childcare expenses

Illegally voted in multiple elections and even represented a district he didn't actually live in after using his parents address as his own on his voter registration

Registered to vote from NC mobile home he never visited in violation of state law that says it's illegal to vote from an address where you are not a legal resident

Forged his late wife’s name on her ballot and voted twice in the same election

Funneled $25,000 of a Russian oligarch's money to the Trump 2016 campaign in exchange for a ticket and access to Trump during a Republican National Committee event

Voted twice using two different but similar sounding names in the 2020 election

Snorted cocaine with a paid escort he also presumably had sex with inside an Orlando hotel room he paid for with campaign funds

Spent over $600,000 in campaign funds on personal expenses including his mortgage, paying off personal loans, multiple vehicles, a motor home, family vacations and a host of other things that had nothing to do with his campaign

Funneled hundreds of millions of dollars through two shell companies connected to his son-in-law to hide its spending during the 2020 Presidential campaign

Unsuccessfully pushed Georgia's Secretary of State to illegally discard thousands of legally cast ballots from the 2020 Presidential election

Illegally used a local UPS store as his legal address for voting purposes in violation of state election law

Asked people who no longer lived in her home district to break the law and vote there anyway in two different elections, one of which she only won by 117 votes

Violated campaign finance law by coordinating with a Super PAC that ran political attack ads against his opponents without reporting the ads as a gift as required by state and federal law and was fined $178,000 by The Missouri Ethics Commission

Illegally paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money to keep her from going public about an extramarital affair they had by directing his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to pay her off and agreeing to reimburse him in monthly installments one month before the 2016 election in violation of campaign-finance laws

Filled out and submitted his ex-wife's main-in ballot for the 2016 election without her knowledge or consent which she only found out about after she attempted to vote and was informed that she already had

Forged more than 100 signatures on a candidate petition to ensure he could get on the ballot for the 2018 Republican primary

Voted in a district he no longer resided in and later unsuccessfully tried to bribe a local Housing Authority employee into falsifying a letter to election officials that attested he had only temporarily moved out of the district in exchange for a donation to the county Housing Authority

Illegally paid $8,912 in campaign funds to the lawyer of a woman he had an extramarital affair with to help pay her legal fees in an attempt to keep their affair from becoming public

Gave $29,800 in campaign funds to a professional gambler with a long criminal record and an additional $25,000 to his wife, illegally reimbursed himself $11,946.65 from his campaign account for expenses he provided no documentation of and spent thousands more on personal expenses including an airplane ticket for his wife, custom suits, spa products, sunglasses, lawncare and paint for his home office, among many other things

Illegally spent more than $100,000 in campaign funds to invest in a wealthy GOP donor's company

Violated campaign-finance laws by paying former Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal $150,000 in hush money to keep her from going public about an extramarital affair they had by orchestrating a convoluted payment scheme involving his lawyer Michael Cohen and the tabloid National Enquirer a week and a half before the 2016 election

Illegally paid Iowa state senator Kent Sorenson $73,000 to switch his 2016 Presidential candidate endorsement from Michelle Bachmann to Ron Paul and then falsified campaign reports to cover it up

Stole $250,000 from his campaign to spend on everyday personal expenses like family vacations, private school tuition and jewelry in addition to a multitude of expenses that funded at least five extramarital relationships on things like ride shares, bar tabs and hotel rooms

Lied about the origins of a $355,000 loan to his 2010 congressional campaign that his parents gave him by falsely asserting the money came from earnings he made working in the private sector

Fraudulently accepted at least $500k for her campaign from her husband by falsely reporting the money came from her personal accounts and accepted an additional $30k from four straw donors who concealed that he was the source of the funds

Illegally paid convicted felon and former Governor John Rowland $35,000 under the table to work on her 2012 Republican congressional campaign instead of using campaign funds as required by law

Billed $50,000 in false expense reports to his campaign by lying about driving 90,000 more miles than he actually did on reimbursement forms

Secretly siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars in unreported campaign donations to his personal accounts and used the money on a myriad of personal expenses including his personal credit card and only escaped charges because he exploited a little-known loophole in Florida's campaign finance laws

Accepted $2,000 more than she legally was able to in campaign donations from an undercover agent posing as a business executive in exchange for expediting one of their development projects through the government certification process and didn't report the money in her election reports which state authorities assert is akin to stealing from her campaign

Paid two felons who weren't legally eligible to vote $2 per signature to fraudulently sign off on petitions for a local ballot proposal he supported

Laundered $190k in corporate donations through Republican national political committees and his PAC as part of a broader scheme that illegally raised over $600k in corporate money funneled into state legislative races in violation of state election law

Illegally used campaign funds to pay for various personal expenses including gambling debts, membership fees in fishing clubs and carnival organizations and numerous other personal expenses for his family and then falsely reported to state officials that the expenses were for campaign-related activities

Embezzled $400k in insurance premiums from a company he owned and deposited it into his congressional campaign account and then tried to cover his tracks by transferring ownership of the company to his wife