The billionaire family that Herschel Walker hit up for a massive campaign donation in 2020 confirmed Thursday that the money was sent to a “non-political account” and that they asked for a refund as soon as they realized it.
The $535,200 was returned, a spokesperson for industrialist Dennis Washington’s company, Washington Corporations, said in a statement to The Daily Beast. However, the statement did not say when that refund took place, and the spokesperson did not respond to further inquiries.
The Daily Beast contacted Washington before publishing an exclusive story about Walker asking him to wire the campaign donation to an entity called HR Talent, one of Walker’s companies, which was not disclosed in his candidate financial statements.
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Washington did not respond to the request for comment until a day after the story—in which campaign finance experts said Walker’s actions were “unprecedented” and possibly criminal—was published.
The statement from the Washington spokesperson noted that the story made clear it was unknown what happened to the money that was sent to HR Talent.
“Upon discovering that a certain portion of the political contributions went to a non-political account, the Washingtons immediately requested and received a full refund of such funds,” the spokesperson said.
The statement indicated that the $535,200 wasn’t just from Dennis Washington, but from multiple family members—possibly a reference to his two sons, who were named in the email traffic between a family representative and Walker.
Walker has yet to comment on his request that the money be wired not to his campaign but to his own company—which Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, called “jaw-dropping.”
“There’s no legal way that this could have played out,” Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance specialist and deputy executive director at the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation, told The Daily Beast.
Emails obtained by The Daily Beast show that the request for the payment to HR Talent came directly from Walker himself, via his AOL account.
The donation was made in the early months of Walker’s campaign for a Senate seat in Georgia. He lost the race after a campaign filled with gaffes and scandal—including revelations by The Daily Beast that he had three out-of-wedlock children that he never previously disclosed publicly, as well as stories that Walker paid for one of his girlfriends to have an abortion, despite his pro-family, anti-abortion political stances.
