More than 13 years after Sen. Frank Lautenberg died, his Senate campaign committee has officially departed as well.
Lautenberg for Senate filed termination paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Sunday, indicating it distributed about $87,000 in cash that had lingered in its account.
Most of that money — about $58,000 — went to the Lautenberg Foundation, a private, tax-exempt nonprofit that primarily makes modest grants to other nonprofits. Among them of late: the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Planned Parenthood, George Washington University, Colgate University, Anti-Defamation League, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, according to IRS records.
“This foundation qualifies as a charitable organization … and no family members receive compensation from the foundation,” Lautenberg for Senate wrote in a memo to the FEC. A campaign representative couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Trending
The rest of Lautenberg for Senate’s residual funds went toward legal and consulting fees, records show.
The Washington Sun reported in April that Lautenberg for Senate began taking steps to unravel itself after more than a dozen years existing as a so-called “zombie campaign.”
That included forgiving a $1.09 million loan Lautenberg personally made to his old campaign committee — one that the committee never paid back and continued to carry on its books for years after the New Jersey Democrat had died in office in 2013 at age 89 while serving his fifth Senate term.
Defunct federal political campaigns with leftover cash have several options for their money, including donating it to charity, paying off “wind-down” expenses and disgorging it to the U.S. Treasury’s general fund.
But a few committees — including those led by dead politicians — have either sat on the cash for months or even years, or used the money for purposes that government watchdogs say violate the spirit, and potentially the letter, of laws prohibiting the personal use of campaign funds.
Author
