Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Inside the Cannon House Office building on Capitol Hill is a little-noticed office called the Legislative Resource Center, where a trove of congressional records are available for the public to access.
PAY DIRT decided to stop by the office to go through some recent taxpayer-funded official mail and found that at least a few members of Congress had used the service to plug some of their donors.
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In May, as she successfully sought a highly competitive Senate seat in Arizona, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema sent a note to constituents and members of her official congressional email list. She hailed Arizona small businesses, and singled out Tempe industrial-equipment manufacturer Blockwise Engineering, and co-owners Ed and Libby Goff, for specific praise.
“They serve tiny startups, some of the biggest companies on Earth, and everything in between, helping drive down the cost of health care for everyday Americans,” Sinema gushed, before stressing the importance of technological education—and her bill promoting it—for Blockwise and other companies.
Sinema didn’t mention a salient fact, though: The Goffs are longtime campaign donors. Since 2013, they’ve contributed $5,900 to Sinema’s political coffers, including $4,000 to support her 2018 Senate bid.
It’s not a huge sum, but the email, and others like it, are supposed to be completely devoid of any political undertones. That hasn’t always been the case with franked mail, the term for taxpayer-funded mass mailings and digital communications from a congressional office. As PAY DIRT readers know, members of Congress are far more likely to take advantage of the privilege when they’re facing tough re-election fights.
But while self-promotion in an election year is widespread among franked mailers, pieces that plug donors stand out. And Sinema wasn’t the only member of Congress doing it last cycle.
In a franked letter early last year, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) aimed to tout the benefits of the Republican tax reform law for large companies and their employees. “Boeing, one of America’s largest employers of veterans, has pledged $300 million to charitable programs and workforce development because of tax reform,” Gaetz declared (his emphasis). “A third of this re-investment will go to Boeing’s charitable organizations, many of which are geared to veterans and the families of veterans.”
Gaetz mentioned that “hundreds” of other companies were benefitting from the law, but that letter only mentioned Boeing. And it happens that the company’s PAC had already donated $6,500 to Gaetz’s campaign during the 2018 cycle. It subsequently gave an additional $2,000.
On Jan. 1, 2019, Gaetz’s former chief of staff registered to lobby on Boeing’s behalf.
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