Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is in trouble again. Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast reports that the Federal Elections Commission has issued ten (10) notices flagging discrepencies totaling almost $3 million in Jordan’s campaign committee’s books. The Daily Beast story, dated this evening, states:
This week, the campaign committee for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), received ten notices from the Federal Election Commission flagging discrepancies on its books totaling nearly $3 million and dating back over two years. … experts say that the dollar amount—errors totaling some $2.87 million—may trigger an FEC investigation.
The errors also appear connected to newly developed, largely hidden payment systems in the murky world of Republican digital advertising, where vendors … take cuts from fundraising ...
The notices ... come in reply to more than a dozen amended reports correcting errors that the campaign caught in a sweeping review of filings, going as far back as 2018. One of the filings discloses errors in spending and fundraising totaling $1,470,286.48.
The commission gave the campaign until early April to reply, and the letters say that a failure to “adequately respond” could draw an audit or enforcement action.
The Daily Beast story quotes legal experts to say that failure to adequately explain the growing discrepencies would likely result in referral by FEC to its enforcement arm.
This reporting is an untimely setback for Jordan, an Always-Trumper who has been looking for any opportunity he can find to unseat Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the Republican leader of the House. Jordan joined in the Big Lie, and did so very publicly, leading the charge to block certification of the presidential election results on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol Insurrection. He joined in the Insurrectionist Reunion, addressing CPAC, infamously held last week on a stage shaped like a Nazi Odal Rune, as if no one but Always-Trumpers would notice.
Untimely scandals have dogged Jordan’s career. As former multi-year (1986-1994) assistant men’s wrestling coach at Ohio State, he was later reported by the New York Times, NBC News, and other sources, to be implicated as a possible silent accomplice of Dr. Richard Strauss, the team physician who serially sexually abused team members. It was an open secrtet among team members, who claim it is impossible that Jordan did not know about it.
Jordan’s latest scandal may not be the largest in this age of Republican campaign finance scams, but the real story here is that Jordan never seems to have learned that no one is successful for long unless a lot of people want him to be. (Reports that he is consulting with Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) on this problem are untrue or premature.) Jordan is abusive of the truth, abusive of witnesses, abusive of congressional colleagues, and weaponizes his “relaxed relationship with the truth,” to use the term Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) used to describe Donald Trump’s lying about the election. Not many of Jordan’s colleagues are going to jump through their asses to rescue him.