1115.org

When the McCain campaign is involved, and when it would be illegal for it to be a fundraiser. Then it becomes some kind of non-campaign finance event, presumably before blossoming into a full-fledged non-campaign non-finance event. It may be a while, though, before they can turn it into a non-event.

St. John gave a $100-a-plate luncheon speech in Ottawa on Friday. The fact that U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins, “a former South Carolina lawmaker whom President Bush appointed in 2005″, helped to organize this apparently political event has led to some controversy.

And McCain was still on Canadian soil when the Democratic National Committee announced it was filing a Freedom of Information Act request for State Department records detailing the involvement of Ambassador David Wilkins during the trip.

The issue is whether Wilkins violated the Hatch Act. Under the Act, Wilkin’s efforts to promote the event are clearly illegal if the event was a fund-raiser:

The Hatch Act circumscribes political activity for government employees. According to the American Foreign Service Association Web site, the State Department’s ethics office prohibits fundraising activities for its presidential appointees.

The Web site for the association prints Cable No. 035610, the guidelines from the ethics division of the Department of State Legal Adviser’s Office.

“In particular, you may not sell tickets for or otherwise promote fundraising activites such as political dinners for a partisan candidate or political committee,” the cable says. It adds that the rules are for anyone “on duty,” and that “the legislative history suggests that ambassadors may be considered to be on duty twenty-four hours a day while they are at post.”

The McCain campaign said Wilkins did nothing more than help gather a crowd for a speech by a U.S. official, something that is well within his role as an ambassador.

It would also be illegal in the first place for McCain to hold a fundraiser in Canada, since it is illegal for U.S. candidates to accept donations from foreigners.

So both McCain and Wilkins may be in legal jeopardy (which is not to say that, in the time of Bush, anything will actually happen to therm) unless a) only American citizens attended the $100-a-plate luncheon (which would let McCain off the hook, but not Wilkins), or b) the event really wasn’t a fundraiser for McCain. Not surprisingly, the McCain campaign is opting for the latter explanation:

A McCain spokesman said that while the campaign pays travel costs for the trip, the luncheon, held by the Economic Club of Canada, is not a fundraiser and not a campaign event.

He said the $100-per-person ticket price for the event is to cover the cost of the lunch and will not benefit the campaign.

“It’s not a fundraiser. That’s to pay for their own lunch. That is not for campaign coffers,” Brian Rogers said. “The Ottawa speech is not in our view a campaign-related event. Thus, anything related to that is not political.”

That’s rich: we don’t consider it a campaign-related event, and therefore it is not. The campaign paid the travel cost, but it wasn’t a campaign-related event.

Unfortunately:
1) The luncheon was listed on McCain’s schedule as a “finance event.” That’s the standard terminology the McCain campaign uses for domestic fundraisers. Thus, McCain’s campaign calendar for this week shows a “Fresno, California Finance Event” today and a “Riverside, California Finance Event” tomorrow So that’s like saying: “Yes, we ourselves called it a fundraiser, but guess what, it’s not really a fundraiser.”

2) McCain campaign co-chair Senator Lindsey Graham was involved in planning this non-campaign event. As you might suspect, he doesn’t usually get involved in planning non-campaign foreign trips by McCain (which is what the McCain campaign is now trying to call this trip, even though it was paid for and organized by his campaign and not his Senate office, which is a non-campaign trip would have been handled).

3) The Canadian newspapers who first reported on the luncheon both described it as a fundraiser:

The article in the Edmonton Sun, and an earlier one in the Globe and Mail, says that Wilkins contacted Thomas d’Aquino, the president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, to help set up what they described as a fundraiser before McCain’s visit.

One imagines that “fundraiser” was the term used by Mr. d’Aquino to describe the event.

4) The Globe and Mail described it as a “political speech” well before the event, that is to say well before there was any indication that the nature of the event was going to become a bone of contention.

Sounds like it’s time for a chorus of the new McCain campaign theme song:

He breaks them here,
He breaks them there,
He bloody well breaks them everywhere!