The campaign for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) agreed to pay an over $60,000 fine to avoid going to court after a Federal Election Commission investigation found the congresswoman’s 2020 committee violated several campaign finance rules.
Citizens for Waters and its treasurer, David Gould, are accused of “failing to accurately report receipts and disbursements” and “knowingly accepting excessive contributions,” per an FEC report released Monday.
The FEC found that Citizens for Waters understated both contributions and expenditures by hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as accepted $19,000 worth of excessive contributions and made $7,000 worth of “prohibited cash disbursements.”
By paying $68,000, the campaign will avoid a court battle. The treasurer is also required to go to a “Commission-sponsored training program for political committees.”
The report states that the campaign committee “does not deny the allegations.” Campaign attorney Leilani Beaver told the FEC in a letter last year that the committee “acknowledges errors were made which were not willful or purposeful,” adding that the errors “were primarily a result of limited staff availability and resources during the pandemic.”
The campaign amended its reports to correct any financial misstatements and “refunded or disgorged” all the excess contributions in a FEC audit.
“Instead, the Committee states that any errors it made were accidental, that the Committee has taken steps to both ameliorate the situation and prevent it from occurring again,” the report adds.
The FEC, a bipartisan panel, voted 4-0 on April 29, just days before the agency was temporarily shut down due to former Commissioner Allen Dickerson stepping down after his term expired.
This is not Waters’s first time facing an ethics investigation into her finances. The House Ethics Committee formally accused the California Democrat of violating conflict of interest rules in 2010 by helping a bank connected to her husband receive government assistance. The charges were eventually dismissed but her chief of staff was reprimanded.
In 2021, the FEC dismissed a complaint from the National Legal and Policy Center that accused Citizens for Waters of accepting an illegal contribution during the congresswoman’s 2018 campaign.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Waters for comment.