Excellent U-T story on Joel Anderson

Just wanted to make sure our readers see the story by John Marelius and Michele Clock in today’s Union-Tribune about state Assemblymember Joel Anderson. It’s an excellent bit of reportage.

Marelius and Clock reported that members of a San Diego County family and the Barona Indian tribe donated, in four separate transactions, a total of $40,000 to the Fresno County Republican Party, which, in short order, donated $38,000, in four transactions, to Anderson’s 2010 reelection campaign. In each transaction, the Fresno GOP got $10,000 and then sent a corresponding $9,500 to Anderson.

Separately, Anderson sent a total of $97,200 from his 2008 campaign fund, in three transactions, to GOP committees in Fresno, Placer and Stanislaus counties. In turn, those county committees donated a total of $93,800 to Anderson’s 2010 reelection campaign.

Obviously, the implication is that in the first set of transactions, the family from San Diego County, the Harmanns, and the Barona tribe, gave $40,000 and Anderson ended up with $38,000, with the Fresno GOP netting $2,000 for its troubles. Then, in that second set, Anderson’s 2008 campaign gave up $97,200 and his 2010 campaign benefited to the tune of $93,800, with the three county committees each getting either $1,000 or $1,400 for their troubles. Shall we call what the committees received “laundering fees”?

So, what’s the big deal? Well, for one thing, the Harmanns and Barona aren’t allowed to donate that much money to a single legislator, but they are permitted to donate that much to county committees. And county committees can distribute the money as they please. However, these transactions cannot be coordinated through the legislator’s campaign. Also, a legislator can move money from one campaign to the next, but there has to be a new accounting of which donors’ money is being moved so that those donors can’t contribute to the new campaign in excess of donation limits. But a legislator can spread his leftover money around the state. And, again, county committees can do as they please with their money.

The hilarious thing about the story is that Barona and the Harmanns say they can’t remember why on earth they would have donated to a central California county committee, hundreds of miles away. There was a really important cause, one of the Harmanns said, but after just four months, the identity of that cause has slipped into oblivion. Amazing. And it’s just an incredible coincidence that three far-flung county committees each took in roughly $30,000 from one Anderson committee and then sent roughly $30,000 to a different Anderson committee. Puh-lease.

I hope the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission has the wherewithal to scour these parties’ e-mail accounts for the smoking-gun communiques.

I was interested in what the reaction would be to the story, so I eagerly checked San Diego Rostra, a new politically conservative blog. An unidentified blogger defended Anderson and floated the possibility that the reporters who did the story are dumb-dumbs:

So, is the story based in reality, or is campaign finance too complex for the media to understand?  Legitimate concerns or media fodder?

Actually, Unknown Blogger, could it be you who doesn’t get what’s going on? Presumably referring to the alleged laundering from the 2008 campaign to the 2010 campaign, the blogger says:

Nary a mention that the transactions were a virtual wash, with Anderson donating more money than he was getting.

That’s hardly the point. The point is that he gets around rules for reporting the source of the donations to his 2010 campaign. It’s that set of transactions that seems to implicate Anderson in all this and cast suspicion upon him with regard to the other set of transactions, which otherwise could simply be a case of donors laundering soft money through a far-off committee to their favorite Assembly member, with the committee skimming a little off the top.