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It wasn’t enough that Herschel Walker’s ill-fated Senate campaign in Georgia had a rough run. Now the feds want to know more about financial moves the campaign made after Walker lost—including tens of thousands of dollars stashed in a “recount” fund long after Walker had conceded defeat.
Last week, the Federal Election Commission sent the Walker campaign committee (“Team Herschel”) a notice flagging a number of apparent violations. Some were fairly common clerical issues. Other items were more eye-catching, like the recount fund, which one campaign finance expert said looked like a “dumping ground for excess contributions.”
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The Daily Beast’s independent review of Team Herschel’s end-game fundraising and spending turned up other oddities. They included hefty sums hauled in after the election, an in-kind private flight donation for the “recount” from Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), as well as a mysterious six-figure payout two weeks after the election to a family friend whom the campaign had previously described as a “dedicated volunteer.”
Not least of the puzzles is the campaign’s $5 million cash on hand—a sizable chunk of change for a candidate that, by all appearances, would have needed to burn every available dollar to keep pace with his deep-pocketed opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA). (Warnock, who outraised Walker by more than $100 million, also ended 2022 with less than $6 million on hand.) Walker also got air support from outside GOP groups like the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which ended the cycle millions of dollars in debt.
Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the watchdog group Documented, who reviewed The Daily Beast’s data, said the “recount” account appeared to be a “dumping ground” for excess cash that the campaign did not want to give back to donors.
“It looks like the Walker campaign largely treated its ‘recount fund’ as a dumping ground for excess contributions,” Fischer said. “It does not appear that Walker expressly fundraised for a recount or spent any recount funds seriously exploring a potential election challenge. Instead, the Walker campaign just allocated excess contributions to a recount fund.”
The FEC’s letter, which focused on Team Herschel’s post-runoff report, opened with a paragraph that none of the campaign finance experts interviewed for this article had ever seen before—asking about tens of thousands of dollars in contributions that the campaign had shuffled over to a “recount” account, some as late as 11 days after Walker conceded the Dec. 6 runoff.
But as the letter notes, “It appears neither a recount was held nor did the committee disburse these funds for recount activities.”
The notice, addressed to Walker campaign treasurer Sal Purpurra, added that if the campaign didn’t “participate in a recount or recount activities,” then those donations “must be refunded or redesignated within 60 days from the date it becomes known that a recount will not occur.” All subsequent reports “should disclose the refund or redesignation of any recount donations,” the letter said, adding that “failure to remedy these donation[s] may result in impermissible contributions.”
Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that advocates for greater transparency in elections, called the notice “striking.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that,” Ghosh, a former attorney with the FEC’s enforcement decision, told The Daily Beast.
“It’s almost like they read our blog or the recent press reports talking about the issue of recount funds not getting enough scrutiny and potentially being used for things other than a recount,” he said. “Maybe we’re pushing the needle in the right direction.”
Those reports include former President Donald Trump’s reported post-White House “recount” spending on document production related to a subpoena from the congressional COVID subcommittee, as well as the 2020 “recount committee” devised by Rep. George Santos (R-NY)—whose talents for lying about basic facts of his life have prompted comparisons to Walker and Trump.
While Team Herschel’s “recount” money appears to have come through different channels, filings suggest the decision to push money into the recount fund came from within the campaign itself.
Some of the transfers appear to have been pre-designated from the 2022 Georgia Victory Committee, a joint fundraising vehicle created for the runoff that split donations between the campaign, the Georgia GOP, the NRSC, and the Republican National Committee. During the runoff, this committee transferred money to the Walker campaign on three different days, according to FEC records. Each day, there were two transfers—one in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a smaller one, in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Each time, the campaign designated the smaller totals for the “recount,” for a combined total of around $70,000, according to FEC filings. Of that amount, around $29,000 came 10 days after the election, records show.
The 2022 Georgia Victory Committee also lists Purpurra as its treasurer. The committee terminated last month.
In other cases, the campaign appears to have redesignated some of its own donor funds to the “recount”—well after the election.
Given the labyrinthine paper trail in modern joint fundraising arrangements, along with the tens of thousands of individual donations the Walker campaign processed at the time, it’s difficult to isolate individual contributions that the campaign itself consciously moved to the recount fund. But The Daily Beast identified some.
One Palm Beach donor, for instance, directly gave the campaign $5,000 on Dec. 6—runoff day—which would have exceeded the $2,900 contribution limit. On Dec. 13, the campaign shifted those funds to the “recount” account, and refunded the $2,100 overage. An Austin-based donor also gave $3,000 on Dec. 6, with the campaign later redesignating the excess $100 to the recount 11 days later.
Moves like those are what caught Fischer’s eye, leading him to view the account as an apparent “dumping ground.”
“Recount funds have been abused for far too long, and the FEC may finally be finally drawing some hard lines,” Fischer told The Daily Beast.
Fischer pointed to another recount item that would appear to defy belief—and gravity.
“One of the most egregious examples pertains to a set of trips on Rick Scott’s private jet,” Fischer said.
Scott, the chair of the NRSC at the time, reported in-kind contributions to the Walker campaign during the runoff period in the form of private air travel, with flights taking place on Nov. 14 and Dec. 2, according to Team Herschel’s filings.
But because those trips totaled $3,269.73, they would have put Scott over the runoff maximum donation limit of $2,900. Team Herschel, however, split the Dec. 2 flight into two separate contributions, sending one to the recount in the convenient amount of $369.73—the exact amount over the $2,900 limit.
“I’m struggling to see how a fraction of a single pre-election plane trip can relate to a post-election recount,” Fischer said.
The Daily Beast sent detailed questions to Purpurra. He wrote back, “All questions asked of Team Herschel in the recent FEC ‘Request for Additional Information’ letter for the 30 Day Post Run-Off report, will be directly replied to the FEC based on the timeline they have given us. This reply will take place thru their (Form 99) response letter system and will include any required amendment(s) as we have done in the past. These items are due to be filed with the FEC by March 23rd and will be part of the public record at that time.”
Purpurra’s response also noted that “Team Herschel has no comment as to any additional questions you have raised that are not included in the official FEC letter.”
Those questions included inquiries about whether the campaign planned to refund the “recount” money to donors, or pass those funds—along with the approximately $415,000 the campaign claims to have hauled in after the election—to another committee. Possible recipients included the NRSC, which shelled out during the runoff and ended the year millions of dollars in debt, or seed money for a possible Walker-sponsored leadership PAC.
The FEC also pointed out that Team Herschel used its “runoff” account to refund large individual donations that had apparently never been designated for the runoff. It also asked about two anonymous $250 donations received via the GOP online fundraising platform WinRed. The donations came from people named “None Required” and “Not Disclosed,” respectively listing addresses at 123 Main Street in San Antonio and 123 Fourfivesixseven Lane, in Everyplace, Ohio. (Zip code 00000.)
“Whoever submitted that is just thumbing their nose at campaign finance laws and the idea of transparency,” Ghosh said.
Team Herschel’s year-end report also raises a few questions.
For instance, the campaign reported owing the same amount of debt to the same two entities on its post-runoff and year-end reports—$231,497.90, which the campaign could easily cover with its $5 million on hand.
That debt is split between two campaign vendors—about $158,000 to Texas-based Scott Howell for media production, and around $74,000 to a Georgia company called Battleground Connect for text message services. Battleground Connect is owned by Walker’s campaign manager, Scott Paradise, and is one of a handful of vendors tapped for text messaging over the course of the campaign.
But while Walker still appears to owe its media vendor and campaign manager, he appears to have handsomely rewarded a “volunteer.”
Two weeks after the runoff, Team Herschel made three same-day payments totaling $127,500 for “logistics consulting” to a family friend of Walker and his wife Julie Blanchard.
That friend, Michelle Beagle, does not appear to have drawn a campaign salary or received any consulting payments during the campaign. In a Dec. 10 Daily Beast article, several Walker staffers blasted Beagle—“no one knows where she came from,” one said—for what they saw as her continual and unhelpful meddling in critical strategic matters. Spokesperson Timmy Teepell described Beagle in that article as “a loyal friend to Herschel and Julie, and a dedicated volunteer and supporter of the campaign.”
It’s unclear why Beagle, as a volunteer, received that $127,500 for “logistics consulting” two weeks after the race was over. But she may have made one beneficial logistical call. According to campaign staffers, Beagle was the person who advised Walker to whip out his honorary deputy badge on the debate stage, The Daily Beast reported in December.
While the moment may have been a bonanza for late-night comedians, and for Warnock himself, it also created a temporary distraction from a damaging news cycle—a woman’s allegation that Walker had urged her to have an abortion, reimbursed her for it, and then urged her to have another one two years later.
She made a different choice the second time, and now raises a son that Walker has not seen in person for seven years.
