In a letter sent out on Thursday, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics reportedly issued a formal reprimand to Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) for soliciting campaign contributions for a runoff election for the Senate seat in Georgia in 2022 while he was conducting an interview with Fox News in the Russell Senate Office Building.
Throughout the course of the nine-minute interview with Fox, the Ethics Committee determined that Graham personally solicited campaign contributions on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Hershel Walker five distinct occasions.
The panel came to the conclusion that Graham had improperly conducted campaign activity in a federal building and that his actions had violated the norm that senators may only use public resources for official actions and not for partisan political activity.
The norm states that senators may only use public resources for official actions and not for partisan political activity.
When Graham directly solicited campaign contributions for his own campaign committee during an interview with the media in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in October of 2020, the panel revealed that it had found that Graham had violated Senate standards of conduct.
This finding was revealed after the panel reached its conclusion.
According to the manual on ethics for the Senate, the act of soliciting or receiving political donations in government buildings or other federal facilities is prohibited by federal law (18 U.S.C. Section 607).
This provision may be found in the United States Code.
After receiving a complaint that included a link to a video recording of the interview, the committee told Graham that it had begun an investigation into Graham’s solicitation of contributions for Walker and that it had informed Graham of this.
In the runoff election held in December, Walker was defeated by Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga).
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