Senator Reid Returns Illegal Political Donation
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON — A seven-year-old political donation has proved costly for the Senate’s most senior Democrat.
Senator Reid, a Democrat of Nevada, last year refunded a $3,000 check that he got in 1999 from a Texas friend, Ben Barnes, after a public interest group disclosed that it was improper. Now, the senator has paid Mr. Barnes more than $1,600 in interest, according to recent filings with the secretary of the Senate.
PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks campaign spending, released the filings yesterday.
A lobbyist and former Texas lieutenant governor, Mr. Barnes made the donation in question to a legal defense fund that Mr. Reid had established to cover costs of his 1998 Senate race recount, which he won by 428 votes over Republican John Ensign.
Congressional ethics rules prohibit registered lobbyists from donating to lawmakers’ legal defense funds, which members of Congress are allowed to set up to pay for legal fights. Mr. Barnes had only recently registered as a lobbyist and said at the time that it was an innocent mistake.
Mr. Reid’s defense fund shut down in March 2001, and the donation went unnoticed until the Center for Public Integrity released a report in August 2005 about a handful of lawmakers, Mr. Reid among them, who had accepted improper lobbyist donations into their legal defense funds.
Mr. Reid brought the matter to the Senate Ethics Committee, his spokesman said, and repaid the $3,000 to Mr. Barnes in October 2005. The Ethics Committee subsequently told him that he should also pay interest for the time that he had the donation. Mr. Reid had an accountant calculate the proper amount using the statutory rate under Nevada law — prime plus 2% adjusted annually — and cut Mr. Barnes a check for $1,611.47 on May 22 out of his campaign fund.
“As soon as this came to our attention, we resolved this as quickly as possible,” Mr. Reid’s spokesman, Jon Summers, said, attributing the delay to time needed to work through the process.
The Ethics Committee also noted that three quarterly reports for the defense fund had never been filed.The reports were for the end of 1999 and the first two quarters of 2000, when the account had not been active. Mr. Reid filed those reports July 31 with the secretary of the Senate.
