AUGUSTA, Maine — The state’s ethics commission on Wednesday found State Rep. Richard Campbell’s Building the Maine House PAC violated Maine election law, but did not give a fine or recommend the case for prosecution.
According to a report by staff at the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices, Campbell’s PAC submitted late financial filings nine times since the fall of 2019.
The report writes, “The PAC has a unique history of showing insufficient attention to filing campaign finance reports on time.”
The most recent filing came 46 days after its deadline of May 31. That prompted the commission to take up an enforcement action.
Joshua Tardy, the lawyer representing Campbell, said “nothing has ever been intentional.”
Campbell’s PAC, though active since 2017, has been dormant for years—reporting neither donations nor expenditures.
This complicated the commission's work to penalize Campbell’s PAC. Jonathan Bolton, the lawyer for the commission, explained that since the PAC reported no transactions, the penalty would be essentially $0.
“As I read the statute, I don’t believe you can assess a penalty in this circumstance,” Bolton said during Wednesday’s meeting.
Advocates criticized this move.
“With today’s proceedings, it's turning into a loophole where people could potentially use this in the future,” Jen Lancaster, communications director for Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, said.
In an email, Lancaster cited a state law that challenges Bolton’s view. It reads: “A person that files a late campaign finance report containing no contributions or expenditures may be assessed a penalty of no more than $100.”
“We are not sure why they did not apply it,” Lancaster said.
Jonathan Wayne, executive director of the commission said that at the time the enforcement action started on July 11th, Building the Maine House PAC hadn't submitted a filing yet.
"In my opinion, at yesterday’s meeting there would have been a fairness problem with assessing a penalty under [that] section... because the PAC and its attorney had no prior notice that would be under consideration at the meeting," Wayne said Thursday. "People facing a penalty by the State deserve meaningful advance notice so they can respond adequately."
The other route the commission could have taken to punish Campbell’s PAC is recommending the case for criminal prosecution.
Failing to file a campaign finance report more than 30 days after the deadline is a class E crime. Commission staff wrote in the report that they cannot remember a specific time that law was invoked in the last 20 years. “But at no time in the last 20 years has a PAC so consistently and blatantly disregarded Maine’s campaign finance reporting requirements,” the report reads.
At the federal level, too, prosecution is rare.
“It's there in particularly egregious or extreme examples,” Mark Brewer, a professor of political science at the University of Maine, said Wednesday. “It's almost never used.”
Brewer said, at least on the federal level, the option of criminal accountability is to have “some teeth in your enforcement.”
With the ethics commission finding Campbell’s PAC violated the law but choosing not to punish, Tardy promised to replace the group’s treasurer within the week.
As for Campbell himself, he told NEWS CENTER Maine in a call: “I’m grateful that they reviewed the information and came to the conclusion that they did.”