Apparent Fraud Costs GOP Group Heavily is a story so filled with irony that I truly do not believe the greatest fiction writers of all time could conjure anything quite so delicious.
The AP reports:
The committee in charge of running House Republican campaigns said Thursday that a former treasurer "deceived and betrayed" the group, which is missing hundreds of thousands of dollars - and possibly more - due to fraudulent acts conducted over the past several years.
The National Republican Congressional Committee told federal authorities that it overstated the amount of cash it held at the end of 2006 by nearly $1 million. A year later, the committee's annual report to the Federal Election Commission - which again was handled by the ex-treasurer - overstated the actual funds on hand by $740,000.
Republican officials said the former employee, Chris Ward, apparently "made several hundred thousand dollars in unauthorized transfers of NRCC funds to outside committees whose bank accounts he had access to" over several years. Most, if not all, of the smaller accounts were associated with GOP candidates or groups…
The Washington Post said that in the last five years, Ward oversaw the accounting for Republican committees that raised more than $400 million, $368 million of it at the NRCC.
But you know, after reading the story, you might begin to believe, as do I, that any streetwise 7th-grader would have gotten suspicious long before the GOP money honchos did. That 7th-grader might have wondered:
“Why the auditors we hired never visit our headquarters?”
“Why have the auditors we hired never complained about not being paid for the auditing services they rendered?”
My laughter-filled guess is that the haughty GOP executives bent low to whisper in each other’s ear:
“Shhh, don’t say anything — we’ve got a really great deal here.”
"Why don’t we hear from Chris Ward, the fellow in charge, any more?”
And given my suspicions above, I can almost hear the GOP leaders snickering sarcastically amongst themselves, “Hope Chris is okay.”
It is such delectable irony because it is the Republicans — voters and office holders — who see themselves, a whole-from-shabby-cloth delusion I think, as the party of fiscal responsibility, and who try every PR and marketing trick in the book to get everyone else to believe it as well.
