Rudy Giuliani and Al Sharpton top the list of campaigns that are still in debt, years later. Deadbeat campaigns linger for years

Never mind that they haven’t actually made a run for the White House in years. Or decades.

The presidential campaign committees of numerous and notable former candidates remain open and technically active, according to a POLITICO review of Federal Election Commission records. Among them: Joe Biden, Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Al Sharpton, Alan Keyes, Mike Gravel, Chris Dodd, Gary Bauer, Dennis Kucinich and both Bill and Hillary Clinton — plus dozens of other less notable politicos.


Reasons vary as to why these committees persist. But for many of the more prominent ones, they’re deadbeats — owing their continued existence to unpaid debts, some of which are so old that they’re difficult to confirm.

Take the Clinton/Gore ’96 General Committee, which enjoyed its heyday at a time when the Macarena topped the pop charts.

Federal records show that it owes $174,260 to the City of Seattle for “event site rental” in addition to smaller debts for consulting fees, polling services and travel. The committee lists the debts as “disputed” in Federal Election Commission filings.

The problem is, Seattle City Hall isn’t sure the former president’s committee owes anything.

“Staff here at that time in those various departments do not remember any unpaid bills of this magnitude,” City of Seattle spokeswoman Katherine Schubert-Knapp said. “It is now, and would have been then as well, policy and practice for a city department with such a large debt to send it to collections and no one has memory of that happening. In other words, we’ve come at this every way we could think of and came up with nothing.”

Tom Ryan, an attorney at the office listed as the Clinton/Gore ’96 General Committee’s official contact, referred calls to former committee counsel Lyn Utrecht, of law firm Utrecht & Phillips, who did not return messages.

The FEC may terminate a committee but typically does so only when a committee falls below minimum reporting thresholds and falls idle for numerous reporting cycles, commission spokeswoman Julia Queen said. Legally, a federal political committee cannot shut itself down if it still owes money to creditors, she noted.

Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who ran in 2000, fits that description. More than a decade after losing the GOP nomination to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, he’s still struggling to clear more than $108,000 in debt from his books, payable primarily for marketing services.

That hasn’t stopped Bauer from later leading a separate federal political action committee, dubbed the Campaign for Working Families.

Bauer spokeswoman Kristi Hamrick said her boss is aware of the presidential campaign debt and is working to pay them off. “It’s an ongoing process, and I suspect it’s a similar thing for other candidates in this situation,” she said.

It is for the Rev. Al Sharpton, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2004 and today hosts a radio and an MSNBC talk show when not engaging in activism through his National Action Network.

Most recent campaign finance filings indicate Sharpton’s presidential committee still owes $925,713 — second only to 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, whose debt exceeds $2.6 million, although much of that is in the form of loans to himself.

Sharpton spokeswoman Rachel Noerdlinger notes that Sharpton 2004 recently paid off $208,000 in civil penalties it owed the FEC for “failing to report accurately all receipts and expenditures, receiving excessive and prohibited in-kind contributions and accepting impermissible corporate contributions.” Queen confirmed the payment.

“Now that the civil penalties have been satisfied, the campaign is contacting vendors to construct a debt resolution plan that must be submitted to the FEC for approval,” Noerdlinger said. “While Rev. Sharpton, as candidate, helped to raise the money to resolve the civil penalties, the additional debt will be reviewed by the campaign and remedied in accordance to FEC’s rules and regulations.”

While Sharpton may be out of electoral politics or government service, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton certainly is not.

Remaining from Clinton’s 2008 presidential run is $274,010 in campaign debt. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) still carries $52,503 in presidential campaign debt. And although former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) is now leading the Motion Picture Association of America, his presidential campaign committee is still on the line for $1,781, primarily in outstanding payments to Verizon.

For some candidates, keeping a committee open has nothing to do with the money they owe and instead may predict future political aspirations or a desire to stay active in politics, election lawyer Larry Noble of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom explained.

Others simply fall dormant but don’t close, which strikes Noble as strange.

“They still have to file reports anyway. It can kind of clutter the record,” he said.

Not all presidential committees remain open because they lack funds.

Howard Dean’s Dean for America committee, which dates to the 2004 election cycle, has no debt. Its issue? Too much money — more than a quarter-million dollars — and it’s been steadily giving it away for ostensibly nonpolitical purposes.

Between July and September, the committee contributed $21,470 to New York-based social services charity ASPIRE, $10,000 to the Student Leadership Project of Philadelphia and $7,000 to the Catamount Trail Association of Burlington, Vt.

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) is using his good financial fortune — the John Edwards for President Committee reported nearly $2.3 million cash on hand through September — to employ a small staff and combat his less-than-stellar legal fortunes.

During the year’s third quarter, Edwards’s presidential committee paid law firm Utrecht & Phillips nearly $87,000 for legal services and office space. It reported spending more than $13,400 on airfare and just less than $3,000 on lodging.

To be sure, many active presidential committees belong to fringe candidates of varying stripes who never raised much (if any) money in the first place.

They range from the mildly notable — 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nominee and former Rep. Bob Barr, for example — to the unorthodox, such as a Republican named Jesus Bilal Islam Allah Muhammed of Dearborn, Mich.