Legal News

Well-Dressed Woman: FEC Deems Palin?s Shopping Sprees Legal

By Ashby Jones

As Wayne State law professor at Law Blog contributor Peter Henning wrote last week, the law on campaign expenditures can be murky. While “authorized expenditures” and “ordinary and necessary expenses” are allowed, the law doesn’t define those terms, which, without more, “can cast a fairly wide net.”

In any event, somewhere up in Alaska, Sarah and Todd Palin are presumably breathing a little easier today. The Federal Election Commission has ruled that the much-publicized shopping sprees taken by the erstwhile Veep-to-be and her husband were completely legal. Click here for the NYT’s account; here for the AP’s; here for the Anchorage Daily News’s.

The purchases in question included $75,062 worth at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis; $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue; $9,447 at Macy’s; and $789 at Barneys New York. Goods were also bought for Palin family members, such as $4,902 spent at a men’s store called Atelier and $92 at Pacifier, a Minneapolis baby boutique.

The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed the complaint against the Republican National Committee and Palin, who has said she didn’t authorize or approve of the spending. CREW argued it violated a ban on campaign money going for personal use.

But the FEC disagreed in a ruling made public Tuesday. The ruling said the ban applies to money raised by candidates — not to political party expenses.

“The RNC states that it used its own funds to make the expenditures for the clothing and accessories. . . . We have no information to the contrary. As such, no candidate funds were converted to ‘personal use,’ ” it said.

Furthermore, according to the NYT, lawyers for the commission pointed out that the RNC also did not violate limits on what could be spent as "coordinated party expenditures" between the committee and a candidate.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 20, 2009 (boomark / email).