Ross Williams
07/14/22
(Georgia Recorder) – Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker is once again facing scrutiny over a finance disclosure originally filed in December, and a left-leaning political action committee is renewing its call for an investigation.
End Citizens United asked the U.S. Department of Justice in April to investigate whether Walker broke the law in a report they said omitted required funding sources.
The next month, Walker updated his filing, bringing his reported earned and non-investment income from about $925,000 to about $4.1 million with the addition of $3.2 million from H. Walker Enterprises.
On Monday, the group wrote a second letter to the justice department alleging that irregularities still have not been cleared up.
End Citizens United alleges Walker did not properly report that $3.2 million in the amended report and failed to properly disclose more than $680,000 he received for 17 speeches between July 2020 and December 2021.
That seems suspicious, said Tiffany Muller, President of End Citizens United.
“When ECU filed that first motion, Walker claimed he’d done everything by the book. But yet, just three weeks later, he revealed that he conveniently forgot to properly disclose $3 million in earnings. And even after getting caught and refiling his financial disclosure, we discovered he’s still hiding the truth from Georgians. He just can’t be honest. He’s still not reporting the many sources of that $3 million, which clients he got it from, what he did for that money, and what financial relationships he maintains with those clients to this day. $3 million. That’s not money you easily forget, unless you’re trying to hide something.”
The Walker campaign dismissed the letter as an election-year ploy.
“We made the technical revisions for the Senate Ethics Committee. This is a desperate attempt to talk about any number other than 9.1%,” said campaign spokeswoman Mallory Blount, referring to the historically high June inflation number announced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday.
“This is also rich coming from (Democratic Sen.) Raphael Warnock who just got caught using his campaign account as a piggy bank to pay for his personal expenses – like the professional Washington insider he is,” Blount added, referring to a Politico report suggesting that Warnock broke spending rules by using campaign money to pay for legal expenses that arose before his time in office. Warnock’s campaign says the spending did not break the rules.
The dueling allegations over filing omissions are typical for a high-stakes campaign that is likely to be one of the country’s closest and most important Senate races of November’s election – Warnock supporters are hoping to draw attention to Walker’s weird lies and strange behavior and Walker supporters hope to make the race a referendum on the economy and inflation.
In the latest poll, an AARP survey conducted between July 5 and 11, Warnock leads Walker 50% to 47% among likely voters, outpacing the other Democrat at the top of the ticket, Stacey Abrams, who trailed Republican Gov. Brian Kemp 52% to 45%.