According to federal authorities, when some crooked Magnolia State politicians wanted to launder bribe money, they didn’t use a shell business or offshore bank, they just used a good-old Mississippi campaign finance account.
Forget a Swiss or Cayman Islands bank. If you want to put money in one of the least scrutinized accounts in the world, one with few rules and nearly nonexistent enforcement of them, just announce a run for office and open a Mississippi campaign finance account. Not to mention, it’s tax free.
The Magnolia State has weak and jumbled campaign finance and ethics laws and little transparency for voters or enforcement for wrongdoers. This leaves our government susceptible to the corrosive influence of secretive big-money special interests. Or, it would appear, corruption.
Mississippi has some campaign finance laws on the books. But they’ve been piecemealed and cobbled together over many years and have created a confusing, conflicting mess. Some code sections contradict each other, and no one official or agency appears to be in charge of monitoring account filings or enforcement. The head of the state’s ethics agency has described Mississippi campaign finance laws as ” jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t fit.”
And our lawmakers appear to like it that way. Even efforts to make campaign finances transparent to the public and easily searchable as they are in nearly all other states have been snuffed out promptly in the Legislature. Meaningful campaign finance reform efforts are generally about as popular with lawmakers as bubonic plague.
READ MORE: Campaign finance reform bill gets cold response; lawmakers axe transparency component
Try this: Go online and look at campaign finances for politicians in any of the states surrounding Mississippi. Search by donors, get totals of who gave what to whom. Now, go to sos.ms.gov, and try doing the same for Mississippi politicians. Notice a difference?
In recent election cycles, we’ve seen millions of dollars of dark money flow into campaigns and PACs and what would appear to be flagrant violations of what few rules and limits we do have go unchecked. We’ve also seen what has become a “pay to play” system, where large campaign donations to top officials appear to give the donors a direct pipeline to lucrative government contracts. There has been no effort to enact anti-pay to play rules as other states have adopted.
Now, according to the FBI, we’re seeing Mississippi campaign accounts being used for laundering bribe money.
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and two Jackson City Council members have been indicted after a federal sting operation in which campaign accounts allegedly played a prominent role.
In a federal indictment, Owens allegedly summed it up nicely for federal agents posing as politician-bribing developers: “Owens also explained that because public officials finance their personal lives through their campaign accounts, campaign contributions were the most effective way to influence them, so long as the money came from within the state of Mississippi.”
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Owens further explained, the feds claim, that in paying a bribe they would need to, “clean it like we always do, we’ll put it in a campaign account, or directly wire it … What we used to do, if people wanted to stay under the radar, you just give a bunch of different checks from a bunch of different companies.”
As part of the alleged scheme, Lumumba accepted a bribe payment from agents posing as developers in exchange for his influence and official actions on a proposed development in downtown Jackson. As allegedly directed by Lumumba and Owens, bribe payments were disguised as five $10,000 campaign donation checks. Lumumba then allegedly laundered that money through his campaign account before writing checks from it to himself.
Owens allegedly also paid off a City Council members campaign debt with bribe money filtered through Owens’ campaign account.
Lumumba has failed to file his annual campaign finance report for three years without consequence. He recently noted failure to file a report is “not uncustomary for my campaign.”
Secretary of State Michael Watson, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England and AG Fitch are all vowing to push again during the 2025 legislative session for campaign finance reform. But it’s unclear, even with the Jackson corruption scandal, whether there is any support among rank-and-file lawmakers and the House leadership.
Enacting such reform would be a monumental political lift.
In the meantime, Mississippi campaign accounts remain mostly unregulated, unexamined and opaque. And our state’s government will remain susceptible to the corruption and cronyism that has plagued it for decades.
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