Bush Recount Fund Leftovers Go to RNC

The Bush-Cheney Recount Fund, which raised $9 million toward legal costs in last year’s election deadlock, is shutting down and has given the GOP a parting gift: $270,000 in surplus funds.

The recount fund’s original plea for donations had promised contributors that “any monies not expended for this purpose will be returned on a pro rata basis.”

The transfer to the Republican National Committee comes a year after Democrat Al Gore conceded the race to George W. Bush. It was listed in a document that the RNC files monthly with the Federal Election Commission.

“In the process of winding down and closing the Bush-Cheney recount committee, excess money was transferred to the RNC in accordance with the law,” RNC spokesman Mark Miner said Friday. He said he did not know why the fund decided to give the RNC the money rather than refund it.

Several White House officials declined to comment on the transfer, and Ben Ginsberg, a top Bush recount lawyer, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Don Evans, who made the early appeal for contributions, is now Commerce secretary. Evans also declined to comment, a Commerce spokesman said.

The RNC worked closely with the recount fund from its inception, providing e-mail lists of likely donors as Bush sought to pay lawyers fighting for him. The RNC now runs the former Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign Internet site.

The money that donors gave the recount fund was not subject to strict federal rules governing contributions to individual candidates. That meant the recount fund could not give it to Bush’s reelection committee.

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri said she believed the Gore-Lieberman Recount Fund is no longer operating. It has given no money to the DNC, she said.

Palmieri said Democrats were troubled by the $270,000 transfer to the RNC because the Bush-Cheney recount organization did not reveal contributors to any government body. “It raises lots of questions about who donated that money,” she said. The Gore-Lieberman fund disclosed its donors to the Internal Revenue Service, she said.

The Bush-Cheney recount committee was not required by federal law to disclose its donors to the government, and there is no public record of the source of the money.

The recount fund did post some, but not all, donors on the Bush-Cheney Web site, but the site lists no donors today.

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the donors included Kenneth L. Lay, chairman and chief executive of collapsed energy firm Enron Corp. Four days after Evans’ plea for money, Lay and his wife, Linda, gave $5,000 each, the maximum accepted by the Bush-Cheney recount fund. The center continues to post the donors on its Web site.

The RNC is required by law to reveal who gives it money. For the $270,000, it simply listed the recount committee as the donor. Ian Stirton, a spokesman for the FEC, said that was sufficient.