“I got into politics because I wanted to make a difference, not to get rich,” Mackenzie told U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria. “I became too comfortable with the FEC law and was not paying enough reverence to it.”

Kelley Rogers, who led many of the committees, is serving a three-year prison sentence. Chip O’Neil, who worked under Rogers, is set to be sentenced in May. The three men were involved with the political consulting firm Strategic Campaign Group, which took money from a network of PACs that included Conservative Strikeforce, Conservative Majority Fund and Tea Party Majority Fund. Mackenzie served as treasurer of those and about four dozen other PACs, he previously said in court.

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The committees, according to court documents, spent most of their money on overhead and little on the candidates they claimed to be helping. Instead, funds went to their firms and associates, including $32,500 to a woman in Winchester, Va., who shared a bank account with Mackenzie and pretended to be doing data entry for his groups, the documents state.

Mackenzie, who pleaded guilty in October to one count of making a false statement to the FEC, admitted lying to the FEC about the friend’s role but asserts he did the data entry work himself and was properly paid.

He also has admitted to concealing funds that cycled through Rogers’s many groups. Those committees took in over $20 million from more than 9,000 conservative donors between 2011 and 2018, almost none of which was spent on candidates.

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“Rogers needed the defendant’s special skills and expertise as a treasurer to paper over the theft of donor funds from the PACs,” prosecutors said in court filings.

Mackenzie said he made $72,000 as a consultant for Rogers and didn’t receive any kickbacks for his role.

Defense attorney Andrea Moseley noted in court that the case stems from a “growing desire” in the Justice Department “to become more strict in areas where the FEC has not been as strict.” But she said Mackenzie did not profit from the broader conspiracy.

Mackenzie, who worked on the political campaign of President Ronald Reagan, as well as those of Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Patrick J. Buchanan, has agreed to pay $172,000 in restitution.

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Prosecutors emphasized that Mackenzie had paid repeated civil penalties to the FEC for filing inaccurate campaign reports. They said in court filings that Mackenzie lied not out of disorganization or embarrassment but to “conceal and disguise the fact that he was stealing PAC funds for his own personal purposes.”

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Such fines are “the name of the game” in campaign work, Moseley told the court. “There’s going to be lots of discrepancies and civil penalties along the way.”

Former senator Bob Smith (R-N.H.) wrote in support of Mackenzie, saying that when he chaired the Senate Ethics Committee in the late 1990s, “members were frequently cited for mistakes on these reports” and there were “constant clashes between FEC directors and lawyers as to the facts.”

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Another supporter is Chesapeake minister E.W. Jackson, who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 2013.

“I trusted him, and he never failed me,” Jackson wrote to the court.

His running mate in that election, former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli II, sued Rogers, Mackenzie and their associates for raising money in his name that never went to his campaign. The suit was settled for $85,000.