Source: News & Observer
Bo Hines, the Republican running to represent North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District is in a bit of hot water with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), according to The News & Observer.
This isn’t the first time Hines, a 26-year-old trust fund kid and political newcomer, has been in the news for his poor decision-making.
A little more than a month ago, Hines was hammered for handing out Chinese-made hats to voters in Johnston County, WRAL reported. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a big deal – lots of goods are made in China – but when you’re running as the candidate who will “build an America-first economy” and “fight for and support American infrastructure” then it’s not a good look. It makes a candidate like that look as though they’re either full of it or just not very intelligent.
The latest bit of trouble Hines finds himself in involves what The N&O calls “Bad math, unexplained spending and vague explanations” in his campaign’s finance reports, which has the FEC on alert.
Earlier this month, the FEC sent his campaign treasurer, Jason Boles, a letter highlighting “five types of errors in a report the campaign filed in April.”
Hines’ senior advisor, Rob Burgess, told The N&O that the notice from the regulatory agency wasn’t a surprise.
“The campaign became aware of a balance discrepancy after a reconciliation was conducted when transferring services to a new campaign treasurer,” he said.
Hines, an ex-N.C. State football player, beat out seven other Republicans in May’s primary. He received former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, as well as help from the right-wing Club for Growth, donors from outside the 13th District and his own bank account.
Hines recently filed a new financial disclosure showing he only had one source of personal income this year – a trust fund that paid him between $100,000 and $1 million, The N&O reported.
In fairness to Hines, you don’t need to be good at math when you’re getting up to $1 million every year for doing nothing.
The N&O reported that the largest error the campaign is trying to fix is a $782.12 discrepancy in April’s quarterly report.
Although $782.12 is not an earth-shattering amount of money for a campaign to have to account for, that wasn’t the only issue.
The FEC also found that the campaign paid “18 people or companies without providing the purpose of those payments on campaign reports.” Some of those who received payments were paid multiple times.
According to The N&O, the payments include the following:
- $450.75 to Nathan Clark
- $8,838.38 to Edge Promo Team LLC (according to WRAL, this is who provided the Chinese campaign hats)
- $1,003.57 to ePay Business Solutions $64.53 to Exxon Mobil
- $1,500 to Google
- $500 to John Guy
- $7,552.54 to Majority Strategies
- $1,740 to the North Carolina State Board of Elections
- $3,000 to Karl Nutturno
- $7,625.39 to Red Curve Solutions $2,558.43 to Bryden Reed
- $206.76 to Shell Oil
- $170.02 to Squarespace
- $898 to Tatango
- $5,994 to Venable
- $552.14 to WinRed
- $8,510 to X Strategies
- $5,750 to Ryan Fournier (co-founder of Students for Trump who faced allegations of conspiring to start a fake law office with a friend who ended up getting 13 months in federal prison)
The FEC gave Hines’ campaign a July 11 deadline to fix the issues.
For a man who said that he and Rep. Madison Cawthorn are “nothing alike” other than their “age and our social conservative values,” he sure isn’t making a very good case for not being Cawthorn 2.0. Both men are inexperienced, unqualified, right-wing extremists with questionable ethics and terrible politics that only serve to divide Americans and destroy democracy.
Hines is running against current state Sen. Wiley Nickel, a Democrat, to represent the district that includes all of Johnston County, the southern part of Wake County, and parts of Harnett and Wayne counties.
