Newly Elected House Republican Admits He Might've Broken a Law Here or There

By Rafi Schwartz  |  December 3, 2018 | 6:50pm
Elections

It’s been less than a week since the Associated Press declared Republican Ross Spano the winner of his race to represent Florida’s 15th Congressional District. And since solidifying his spot as a rep.-elect, Spano would now like his future constituents to know that actually, he might have maybe broken some election laws.

Spano admitted in a Federal Election Commission filing made public this weekend he’d received $180,000 in loans from two friends, and then flipped almost all that money from his personal account into his “Ross Spano for Congress” campaign fund. In the letter, authored by his attorney Elliot Berke, Spano claims that he “believed he was acting in full compliance with the law” at the time, and only now realizes that the financial musical chairs “may have been in violation of the Federal Campaign Finance Act 52 U.S.C. § 30101 et seq.” which is designed to prevent individual donors from monopolizing a candidates finances.

Whoops.

According to his letter, Spano—a lawyer and former state legislator whose 2017 effort to declare pornography a “public health crisis” was stymied after he “liked” a 17 second video titled, “expert oral sex 17″ from the “Goddess Lesbian” Twitter account—fired his previous attorneys upon learning that he’d possibly committed election fraud, and that he was seeking “advice and recommendations” from the FEC for how to “address this matter.”

Spano’s after-the-fact admission of maybe possibly breaking election law to win a congressional campaign comes as Kristen Carlson, the Democrat he beat for the House seat, has called on the FBI to investigate the potentially shady dealings.

Carlson stressed to the Tampa Bay Times that she’s not simply complaining about her loss, either. “I don’t know if that amount of money would have affected the outcome of my race,” she said, “but I really do believe it affected the primary race.”

 
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