Convicted Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) punctuated his plunge from political grace with a campaign finance report for the ages, taking out a home loan and selling his own campaign vehicle for quick cash after legal expenses torched hundreds of thousands of dollars of his donors’ money.
A federal disclosure submitted last week shows the Fortenberry campaign chucking nearly a million dollars into a legal sea over the first three months of the year, about $100,000 more than it had in the bank to begin with. The vast majority of that money vanished into costs associated with the Republican’s failed legal defense, including nearly $600,000 in attorney’s fees in the months before his March trial.
Had Fortenberry not taken personal steps, those expenses would have busted the campaign before bills came due at the end of March, coincidentally just days after a Los Angeles jury convicted him of lying to the FBI about illegal campaign contributions. To make ends meet, Fortenberry took out a home equity loan, tapped his closest remaining allies, put off some bills, and even liquidated the campaign’s vehicle—on the day he was convicted, to himself.
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The campaign started the year with about $895,000 on hand. But before the end of February, Fortenberry had already burned through the above-mentioned $600,000 in legal fees, plus $250,000 for a public relations blitz and $30,000 for communications consulting. He capped it all off with a final sting of $13,600 in investment losses.
Donations couldn’t come close to that pace, especially for a congressman under indictment. After doling out about $39,000 in refunds, Fortenberry closed the quarter with a total $55,315 in the bank.
But Fortenberry wasn’t tapping the campaign only to pay his lawyers. He also dipped into the account for travel and meal expenses for himself and his family during the trial. ($1,000 at a DoubleTree and $690 at the LAX Westin.) He even used donor funds to cover travel costs for one of his own witnesses—his chief of staff Andrew Braner, who was reimbursed $875 for transportation and lodging.
By the day the trial opened on March 17, the account looked bleak. That day, Fortenberry did something he hadn’t done since his first bid for Congress in 2004—he loaned his campaign money, $61,000 that he in turn had borrowed from a home equity line of credit.
But as the trial rolled on, the nine-term Nebraska Republican got a little string from some remaining political allies, including Rep. Carol Miller (R-WV), Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who all injected thousands of dollars into his campaign account on March 23, the day before jury deliberations began.
The next day, after meeting for just two hours, the jury convicted Fortenberry on all three counts, two for lying to the FBI and one for attempting to falsify or conceal evidence.
The same day he was found guilty, Fortenberry bought his campaign’s vehicle for $13,500—the exact price the campaign paid for it in 2018. The cash didn’t even offset the investment losses.
The Daily Beast confirmed that the vehicle Fortenberry bought was the same truck where last October, Fortenberry, flanked by his wife and dog, recorded a video announcing that he was about to be indicted. Hours later, he was.
But even though the campaign had purchased the vehicle with donor funds—off of Craigslist, the previous owner told The Daily Beast—Fortenberry claimed that he owned it personally.
"Hi, this is Jeff Fortenberry, and I'm out for a drive in my 1963 Ford F100 pickup truck," Fortenberry said in the video, which was filmed next to a cornfield, adding, "we do this every now and again."
Months later, he laid the same claim to ownership in a separate F100-set video, flanked with wife and dog, when he announced that despite the indictment and pending trial, he would seek reelection.
If Fortenberry did drive the truck habitually, as he claimed on tape, it could run afoul of campaign finance laws barring candidates from converting donor funds to personal use.
In the days after the truck purchase and felony conviction, a number of campaign bills came due. They included staff payroll, consulting expenses, and tens of thousands of dollars in contribution refunds—including to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Majority Committee PAC. When the books were settled at the end of the quarter, the campaign had just $50,143 in the bank.
That number, however, includes Fortenberry’s HELOC loan, which comes due in 2023. As of March 31, the campaign is in debt. Without the loan, the campaign would have ended the quarter $10,000 in the hole.
Curiously, despite the weeklong trial, the campaign committee didn’t report any legal costs after late February, and it’s unclear whether Fortenberry shouldered those expenses personally or struck an agreement with his attorneys.
While it’s not abundantly common for campaigns to pick up personal legal expenses, Fortenberry’s case is the exception that proves the rule. Candidates are permitted to draw on donor funds for expenses that they would not have incurred if they weren’t a federal official or candidate. And Fortenberry’s trial happened to center on the very reason campaigns have bank accounts in the first place—donations.
In Fortenberry’s case, they were impermissible donations. The congressman had lied to the FBI about when he first learned that $30,200 in contributions from a 2016 fundraiser had flowed through straw donors from an illegal source: a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Fortenberry knew and met multiple times.
While neither Fortenberry nor his campaign were prosecuted for knowingly accepting the illicit funds, the campaign didn’t disgorge them until 2019, after his second interview with the feds. If Fortenberry had hung on to the money, it still wouldn’t plug the $50,000 hole the campaign is in today as a result of that duplicity.
Fortenberry resigned on March 31. His sentencing is scheduled for June 28, and he has said he plans to appeal. Each of the three counts carries a maximum of five years in prison.
The Daily Beast reached out to Fortenberry and his public relations firm, but received no reply.
