NFL lawyers tackling political concerns
Last September, when Cynthia Hogan began quarterbacking the National Football League’s Washington, D.C., office, the league was suffering through a spate of disastrous headlines — the Ray Rice domestic violence case, concussion concerns and grumbling over its tax-exempt status, among other matters.
So she called in the NFL’s lawyers to review its previous plays.
Hogan, herself a lawyer and former counsel to Vice President Joe Biden, ordered up a “top-to-bottom review” of the NFL’s political action committee by the league's outside lawyers because she was new to the league, said Greg Aiello, an NFL spokesman.
Aiello also said Hogan wanted to make sure the NFL’s political action committee, which donates money directly to political candidates, was following best practices and providing “in-depth briefings and her and her staff” on PAC operations.
The legal review wasn’t free — nowhere close — and the NFL was slow to pay its bills.
The NFL’s PAC owed law firm Covington & Burling nearly $33,000 in outstanding invoices at the end of 2014, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Aiello said the firm’s bill has since been paid, and the review prompted only “housekeeping changes” and rearranging personnel.
Comparatively, the NFL PAC paid Covington & Burling less than $10,000 during 2013, federal records show. The legal bills came during a two-year election cycle when the NFL’s PAC, known as Gridiron PAC, gave less money to federal candidates than it ever has — $330,750, compared to more than $500,000 during the 2010 midterm election cycle.
The money was split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Primary Source. Primary Source keeps you up-to-date on developments in the post-Citizens United world of money in politics. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
Related stories
Top 5 lobbyist bundlers; power couple Tony and Heather Podesta top the list
Obama inauguration sponsors spent millions influencing government
Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
