The other shoe has dropped for Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ).
His campaign committee has agreed to pay a $125,000 federal fine for misusing donor money and associated reporting violations, according to new Federal Election Commission disclosures.
The investigation, which found “reason to believe” that the violations were “knowing and willful,” was the FEC twin of a separate congressional ethics probe that fined the Arizona Republican $50,000 in 2020 for nearly a dozen violations. The inquiries centered around Schweikert’s dealings with his former chief of staff, political consultant Oliver Schwab, specifically payments to Schwab’s personal credit card and firm.
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The agreement was signed on Jan. 12, and the FEC released the documents almost a month later on Friday. As part of the agreement, the Schweikert campaign admitted to breaking three federal laws—all related to expenses.
The violations occurred sporadically between 2014 and 2018. In that time, the campaign misreported about $50,000 worth of expenses as going straight to Schwab, without disclosing the sub-vendors Schwab then paid.
Those reports also did not correctly describe another approximately $78,000 in payments, applying generic “consulting” labels instead of the true categories, which included web services, food and beverage, and gifts.
Finally, the campaign converted about $1,500 to personal use, including by reimbursing staffers who covered Schweikert’s personal costs out of pocket—including dry cleaning and flight upgrades.
As part of the agreement, the campaign has also filed a series of corrected reports from the time of the violations, clarifying the expenses. The reports came in on Thursday night and acknowledge that the campaign has directly repaid the vendors, which include the Capitol Hill Club, an art store, and the Scottsdale Plaza Resort.
Schweikert, who touts his commitment to defending fiscal responsibility, first entered Congress on the initial Tea Party wave in 2010. He belongs to the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, serves on the Ways and Means and Joint Economic Committees, and was among the 138 House Republicans who objected to Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election—however, he only objected to ballots from Pennsylvania, not his own state, where he had won re-election with about 55 percent of the vote.
The $125,000 FEC fine for the “2020 Fiscal Hero” is more than double the penalty he incurred from the House ethics probe, which, in addition to the financial wrongdoing, also found that Schweikert impeded congressional investigators.
But those fines pale in comparison to Schweikert’s legal costs associated with the investigation. Since 2018, the firm handling the matter, Holtzman Vogel Josefiak & Torchinsky PLLC, has collected more than $1 million in legal fees from the Schweikert campaign, according to FEC data.
Still, the investigations differ in two other key ways.
First, the congressional investigation was public knowledge at the time, but the FEC investigation has been a secret for three and a half years—until today.
The congressional probe stemmed from a 2017 Washington Examiner report detailing large payments to Schwab, in an apparent violation of rules limiting outside income for senior congressional staff. Following the report, the Office of Congressional Ethics opened an inquiry, which led them to recommend the House open a full-blown ethics investigation. The Ethics Committee announced that investigation on June 28, 2018.
At the time, Schweikert downplayed the allegations, describing them to reporters as “purely clerical.”
“We buy coffee, it’s on [Schwab’s] credit card and we reimburse him. And when they did the reimbursements, they marked it as income instead of reimbursements. So now we have to unwind all of those,” Schweikert said.
“It’s annoying,” he added, “but it’s just the way it works…. I think everyone is going to be happy with how we’ve unwound the clerical mistakes.”
The other key difference is how the investigations started.
The OCE opened its inquiry after the Washington Examiner report, but the FEC did not. It was actually the Schweikert campaign who asked the FEC to open the investigation, filing a “sua sponte” complaint with the commission—“of his own accord” in Latin—and identifying its own violations of campaign finance law.
The campaign filed the secret complaint on June 29, 2018, the day after Schweikert shrugged off the House ethics probe. Ten days later, Schwab was out of work.
