A Mysterious Republican Committee in the Virgin Islands
There must be something wrong me to get this much glee out of seeing Republican donors getting scammed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/upshot/a-mysterious-republican-committee-in-the-virgin-islands.html?_r=0
There are a few things you should know about the Virgin Islands Republican Party: It has no full-time staff, has not had regular meetings for nearly two years, and only about 4 percent of the $200,000 it has raised since last fall has gone to party coffers. Through the end of March, it moved exactly $7,927 to the party. Most of the contributions, solicited by mail sent to people across the county, end up in a bank in Fairfax, Va., and are used to solicit yet more donations.
The Virgin Islands committee has made two donations — to Republican candidates running for the Senate in South Carolina (Tim Scott) and Oklahoma (T. W. Shannon). Its third donation was to a Georgia state superintendent candidate. The Virgin Islands committee spends the overwhelming bulk of its money not for basic political activities like voter registration or party messages, but to raise more money. A few other conservative political committees employ this technique, and the biggest beneficiaries are a number of fund-raising companies in Northern Virginia.
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The VIGOP committee is different from other state party committees in several respects. First, it appears to raise no significant money from the territory, whereas most state parties depend on in-state support from individual donors. Second, it has no local bank account listed on its registration form, and the same person — Mr. MacKenzie — is listed as both the custodian of the committee’s records and its treasurer. Third, no Virgin Islander is listed on the committee’s forms.
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The fund-raising approach of the Virgin Islands committee is unusual for party organizations, but it’s not unusual for Mr. MacKenzie. In addition to the party committee, Mr. MacKenzie is the treasurer of nine other active political action committees that have raised a combined $10.1 million from individuals since the beginning of last year. The committees include the Conservative StrikeForce, Freedom’s Defense Fund and the Black Republican PAC. Almost all of them employ similar techniques: using direct mail to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, most of which is spent on more fund-raising activities, although in the past some of the committees ran television advertisements.