Michele Bachmann, once a Tea Party favorite for the presidency and a Republican rising star, now finds herself in the midst of ethics questions surrounding her failed presidential campaign. The Office of Congressional Ethics, which investigates possible matters of unethical behavior, referring them to the House Ethics Committee if warranted, has been interviewing former campaign staffers about inappropriate payments and use of campaign funds.

The Daily Beast reports that most of the questions about Bachmann herself have more to do with whether she knew of any unethical behavior by Guy Short, her national political director, and Iowa State Senator Kent Sorenson, her campaign chairman for Iowa. There are currently no official allegations that she was directly involved with any wrongdoing.

Back in January, Peter Waldron, who was one of her staffers, wrote to the Federal Election Commission that they were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that was to prohibit them from talking to law enforcement officers or investigators without first checking with the campaign.

There are also allegations that she’s refused to pay five of her campaign staffers for the work that they did during her bid for the presidency due to failure to sign the non-disclosure agreements. Salon reported that while Waldron and others are owed a mere $5,000, and she still had at least $2 million in her campaign account at the time the complaints surfaced, she refused to pay them unless they signed the agreements. Those agreements appeared after the police in a small Iowa town began investigating complaints that the campaign stole a list of home-schooling families, using that list to try and fundraise.





In addition to that, her entire staff in New Hampshire quit over payment issues as well.

Salon posted an update to the article, with a statement from James Pollack, the campaign’s finance chairman, calling Waldron’s allegations false. He states emphatically that the campaign has settled most of its debts and has been actively working with the few remaining people that are still owed money.

Michele Bachmann went into the 2012 election cycle trying to brand herself as the only true conservative among the entire field of Republican candidates. However, she didn’t just present poorly, she spent the campaign making all kinds of egregiously incorrect statements. She also made the impossible promise of bringing $2 per gallon gasoline back if she were elected, which showed she had no real idea of just what the president does and does not have direct influence over.

Earlier this year, The Huffington Post reported that, in an interview at Patrick Henry College, she was very proud that she didn’t get anything wrong during the debates, going so far as to say her record on the facts was “impeccable.” She even said, “You have to be a virtual Wikipedia. You can be asked anything,” implying that she has encyclopedic knowledge of “anything” that a candidate might be asked.

Given the number of facts she got incorrect, including where the Revolutionary War started and calling John Quincy Adams a founding father, not to mention that she feared Obama turning interrogation of POWs over to the ACLU (the CIA currently conducts those interrogations), and a whole host of others, one can call both her memory and her judgment into question when confronted with the idea that she thinks she got everything right during the debates she participated in. At best, anything she says now, whether about her campaign ethics or anything else, ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

According to ABC News, the Office of Congressional Ethics would neither confirm nor deny that an investigation was taking place. Likewise, the Federal Elections Commission did confirm that they received a complaint from Waldron, but would not say whether that led to any investigations.

Rika Christensen is an experienced writer and loves debating politics. Engage with her and see more of her work by following her on Facebook and Twitter, and check out her blog, They Need To Go.