Remember Kent Sorenson, a Republican Iowa state senator and then-presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s state campaign chairman, who defected to Ron Paul’s campaign in 2011– four hours after attending a Bachmann event?
In case you were wondering whatever happened to Sorenson: he has pleaded guilty to hiding money he received from Paul’s campaign to switch his allegiance from Bachmann.
The Des Moines Register reports:
Investigators concluded that Sorenson secretly negotiated with the Paul campaign over a period of months to join the campaign, and received $73,000 in a series of payments to do so.
The problem with that was the manner in which the payments were made: monthly payments of $8,000 were routed through a film production company and a second company before being received by Sorenson, circumventing the reporting requirements of the Federal Election Commission.
In public statements when he switched campaigns, Sorenson said he was not being paid. He also provided false testimony to an independent investigator about the payments “in part to obstruct investigations that he anticipated by the FBI and FEC,” according to the Department of Justice.
For these crimes, he pleaded guilty to one count of causing a federal campaign committee to falsely report its expenditures to the FEC and one count of obstruction of justice.
Sorenson could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 for the first count and 20 years in prison and another $250,000 fine for the second.
If Sorenson had been open and above-board about switching his support for money, he would have been in the clear. It would have been the free market in action.
