Campaign finance regulators overseeing New York City’s generous taxpayer-funded matching program for political campaigns flagged nearly 400 donations to Eric Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign as possibly bundled and requiring disclosure the campaign never provided, according to records obtained by Gothamist.
The city’s Campaign Finance Board generated the list of donations that were combined into a single contribution – a practice called bundling – in October 2021 as part of an audit of Adams’ fundraising. It represents nearly $396,000 in potential public matching funds for his campaign, a Gothamist analysis of the data shows.
The board says the audit is meant to instill confidence in the public financing program, where small-dollar donations are matched 8-to-1 with taxpayer funds. Officials said the audit has been paused while the FBI investigates whether the mayor’s 2021 campaign collected illegal foreign and straw donations.
But the federal probe has also made abundantly clear that rules and enforcement around campaign finance law leave a lot of room for improvement.
“It’s unfortunate, but there can be a gap between the intent and the specific black letter of the law,” said Nicole Gordon, the Campaign Finance Board’s founding executive director, in an interview.
Neither Adams nor his campaign have been accused of wrongdoing. Still, the campaign appears to have failed to disclose some fundraising events and bundlers, also known as “intermediaries,” who deliver donations from others, reporting by Gothamist and other news outlets has found. Although intermediaries must generally be disclosed to the CFB, the rules around them are contradictory and riddled with loopholes — making enforcement tenuous and transparency elusive, according to several election attorneys interviewed.
The Campaign Finance Act outlines several exemptions where intermediaries are not required to make disclosures, including when they’re relatives of contributors, or when…
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