So, Hillary for President owes $20 million plus. You might think that Clinton stands to spend a lot of her next year or so fundraising to pay all of that back. But apparently not.
But these laws were written by, and for, politicians, so a situation like this is less problematic for her political future than you might think. Not only is she not personally on the hook for the roughly $9 million owed people not named Clinton;her other campaign committees have no responsibility for it either.
Beyond that, she’s not even legally able to raise money to pay back all of that money after the Convention in August. And once she fails to raise enough before August the small businesses in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and every other state where she’s left a trail of debt, not to mention Mark Penn, who’s still owed $5 million, aren’t ever seeing a dime. They can’t get a dime from the Clintons personally, despite the fact they have plenty of assets to repay the money. They can’t get a dime from the next Hillary for Senate committee, despite the fact that she’ll be actively raising money to run for office again. They can’t even get any money if Hillary runs for President again in 4 or 8 years, because she’d set that up as a new and different committee, just to avoid the debt.
This is a broken fucking system. Everyone agrees politicians need to be more accountable. Yet we let them write the laws to get off the hook for their campaign debts. I doubt this will ever get fixed, but it would be nice if our politicians were at least a little less shameless.
Jeremy Beales 