Virginia AG Cuccinelli's Questionable Campaign Contributions

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

If Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II was a great lawman, we might tolerate his preoccupation with the human sexual organs, and what individuals choose to do with them. If he were Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes--heck, if he was Inspector Gordon--we might want to forgive his conspiratorial fantasies and academic witch hunts.

But it seems that Cuccinelli is a few bullets short of a load when it comes to spotting actual bad guys. According to the Washington Post, King Kook personally solicited $50,000 in campaign contributions from an apparent scam artist whose charitable association apparently consisted of 1) himself, and 2) some of those telephone solicitors-for-hire who call and ask for money as we sit down to dinner.

Red faces abound in Richmond, where the legislature passed, and Gov. Robert McDonnell signed, a bill pushed by this con man to relieve his organization, and others like it, from such pesky state regulations as registering and filing financial reports.

The St. Petersburg Times acted where Cuccinelli failed, and discovered that 84 of the charity’s 85 state and national directors appear to be fictitious. After being quizzed by the newspaper, the con man vanished from his Tampa, Fla., duplex, leaving no forwarding address. A lawyer in Ohio told the Washington Post that the charity’s organizers are indeed alive, but operate under deep cover, for fear of being attacked by vengeful Islamic jihadists.

The charity, which is now under investigation by Cuccinelli’s law enforcement counterparts in three states, claimed to be raising money for U.S. Navy veterans. Who knows how much money it wasted that might have gone to real veterans and their families, or how much damage it has done to actual charities and veterans groups.

McDonnell is giving $5,000 he accepted to an actual veterans’ organization. But Cuccinelli intends to keep his hard-won cash, a spokesman told the Post. He will “consider” returning it if the missing man (who was the attorney general’s second-largest donor) is convicted of a crime. Clinging to a technicality. Now there is a lawman setting a good example.

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