Campaign Watchdogs: O’Donnell’s Spending ‘Flat-Out Illegal’

Created: September 20, 2010 13:51 | Last updated: July 31, 2020 00:00

Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s GOP primary victory might be old news, but her campaign’s financial improprieties dredged up during the primary contest continue to haunt her candidacy going forward. Melanie Sloan, executive director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says that even cursory reviews of O’Donnell’s campaign spending forms reveal that she used contributions to pay for meals, gas, bowling trips, and personal rent, among other expenses considered outside the purview of her campaign.

“I’ve never seen a candidate who just stole all their campaign money and used it for personal use,” she told CBS News. “What it seems like here is that Christine O’Donnell had no other way to support herself, so she thought, ‘Okay, I’ll run for U.S. Senate.’”

Sloan and her group are calling on the Delaware attorney’s office to open a formal, criminal investigation into the matter. O’Donnell, thus far, has refused to return calls for comment on the matter and seemed to dismiss such allegations as mere smear tactics during her speech at the Voter Values Summit in Washington this Friday: