Thom Tillis is tangled in a campaign money scandal. What should he have known?

Should the Thom Tillis campaign have flagged campaign contributions at the center of a growing controversy involving U.S. Postmaster General and North Carolina political powerbroker Louis DeJoy?

Weekend reports in the Washington Post and New York Times say that for more than a decade, DeJoy pressured employees at his former N.C. company to donate to Republican candidates, then reimbursed the donations through bonuses, according to employees. The reports detailed how multiple employees at High Point-based New Breed would donate to the same candidate on the same day, sometimes writing checks for an identical amount of money.

“We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, told the Post.

Such straw-man schemes are a violation of campaign finance laws, which prohibit individuals or companies from getting around contribution limits by repaying others to donate instead. DeJoy denied doing so in U.S. House testimony last month, calling it aN “outrageous lie.” He needs to respond to his former HR director’s on-the-record accusation.

One of the big beneficiaries of the questionable fundraising? Thom Tillis, now running for re-election to the U.S. Senate. According to the Times, 20 midlevel and senior officials at New Breed donated a total of $37,600 to the Tillis campaign on the same day in October 2014. Each official wrote a check for either $2,600, the maximum allowable donation, or $1,000. The Post reports that

Tillis campaign committees collected nearly $300,000 from people at the company in 2014, when Tillis ran to unseat Democrat Kay Hagan.

Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for Tillis’s campaign, told the Post in an email: “Neither Senator Tillis nor our campaign had knowledge of these findings.”

Should Tillis have been more aware? Not necessarily. “The fact that several employees donated the same amount on the same day would not alone be a red flag,” Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation for Common Cause, told the Editorial Board. “This fact pattern tells me the company likely held a fundraising event. You would see the same pattern, minus the common employer, for any fundraising event.”

What might be more of a red flag, Ryan says, would be large contributions from employees whose listed occupation generally has a salary that wouldn’t allow for big donations. The Post report cited “several non-executive employees who gave substantial political donations.” Tillis and his campaign should address whether it received such contributions and what it intends to do about them.

Perhaps more concerning is the senator’s apparent reluctance to criticize his benefactor for postal delays that have resulted from DeJoy’s draconian measures to cut USPS costs. Nor has Tillis raised questions about DeJoy’s troubling House testimony. (DeJoy also said under oath that he hasn’t cut overtime at USPS, which reports have contradicted.)

DeJoy is accustomed to being treated right by the people who receive his money. He was a surprise appointee as Postmaster General, given that he had no previous experience with USPS. His wife, Aldona Wos, has won presidential and gubernatorial appointments that included a disastrous tenure as North Carolina’s health secretary under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.

Certainly, undeserved appointments are not a Republican phenomenon, and neither is money’s outsized influence on politics. But while DeJoy’s potential exploitation of the system is not surprising, it may be illegal. Both Democrats and Republicans - including and especially Thom Tillis - should call for DeJoy to explain the troubling contributions. If he is unable to do so, he should resign.

This story was originally published September 8, 2020 at 3:33 PM.