Braun Campaign Sues Former Treasurer

Let’s talk about Mike Braun’s former campaign suing his former treasurer. This is a wild story. It actually goes back a couple of years, and now it may be ending up in some sort of courtroom. The Indiana Capital Chronicle has the story. The lawsuit alleges that Braun and his former campaign, going back to the U.S. Senate days, suffered reputational damage. The complaint cites articles in Forbes, USA Today, and the IndyStar that allegedly caused “grave losses of political and financial support worth thousands, possibly millions, of dollars.” Before we get into the details of what is alleged to have happened, Braun is now the governor. Did you see the war chest he came back with in 2024? He won the election and had tens of millions of dollars given to him. I think he did okay with donations. It’s going to be pretty hard to argue that you lost a lot of money when you easily won the election and a whole bunch of people gave you huge amounts of money. This situation goes back to 2024 when Braun was running for governor. The FEC, the Federal Election Commission, fined Braun’s campaign, which has since morphed into something called the Freedom and Opportunity Fund. I believe that’s because it was originally a federal campaign and there are different rules about what you can do with different money. I’m not sure about the entire reasoning, but it’s now called the Freedom and Opportunity Fund. The FEC fined the campaign $159,000 for failing to correctly disclose loan terms, dates, repayment amounts, forgiveness, outstanding balances, and guarantor information for transactions totaling $11.5 million from July 2017 through December 2018. What this appears to involve is Braun loaning or giving his campaign a bunch of money. Remember when he was running all those ads during the U.S. Senate primary? He put a lot of his own money into the campaign. At some point he ended up getting a lot of that money back. I believe he repaid himself through the campaign. If I have any of those details wrong someone can correct me, but he did get a large amount of that money back, possibly all of it by now. According to the Capital Chronicle, the transactions involved three bank loans, thirteen lines of credit, and thirteen candidate loans. The FEC audit also found another $97,000 in loans and lines of credit that were not disclosed at all. This became a massive story at the time and even made national news because Braun was running for governor while serving as a sitting U.S. senator. Now the campaign is going after its former treasurer, Travis Kabrick. They describe him as grossly negligent, alleging he destroyed files, abruptly quit, and failed to respond to the campaign after leaving. Here is the question we asked at the time, and I’ll ask it again now. According to the Capital Chronicle, the FEC identified errors in every single regularly filed report submitted by the campaign while Kbrick served as treasurer. Braun’s attorney in this case is Jim Bopp. Where have we heard that name before? Jim Bopp is the lawyer involved in the case in Clay County with Alexandra Wilson, the woman trying to run for Indiana State Senate in Clay, Vigo, and Sullivan counties. He is the one who took the case to the Indiana Election Board, which ended in a tie vote that allowed her to remain on the ballot despite allegations that she had a felony conviction making her ineligible to run for public office in Indiana. That same Jim Bopp is now representing Braun’s former campaign, the Freedom and Opportunity Fund. Bopp said he has represented a lot of campaigns and done a lot of FEC work, and that this situation is very serious compared to what he has seen over the years. According to the Capital Chronicle, the campaign is seeking to recover the $159,000 fine along with attorney’s fees and damages related to reputational harm, which Bopp suggested could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. But this raises a major question. When you are running a U.S. Senate campaign and millions of dollars are flowing into it, is there nobody checking the treasurer’s work? As the candidate, don’t you take some level of ownership? Braun hires questionable people all the time. Look at Jennifer-Ruth Green. She was given a major cabinet-level position in Braun’s administration after losing a congressional race. Within seven or eight months she was out of the job following an inspector general investigation involving unethical behavior, and she paid a large fine. Braun hires these people regularly and it often doesn’t work out. So the question becomes this. You are running a U.S. Senate campaign with millions of dollars flowing in and out, including your own money. Wouldn’t you have someone double-checking the treasurer’s work? Wouldn’t you have a second person reviewing it, signing off on it, and confirming everything was accurate? Even if the treasurer was the most incompetent person in the world, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. But even if that were the case, shouldn’t you still have some level of responsibility for what happened? Shouldn’t there be some oversight to make sure everything isn’t resting in the hands of just one person? With Braun there never seems to be any acceptance of responsibility. Remember the property tax situation. He wouldn’t veto the bill or call a special session. Instead he signed a terrible bill and blamed everyone else. He said he couldn’t beat the General Assembly. He said there weren’t enough phone calls. There weren’t enough emails. Tens of thousands of calls and emails had come in, but somehow it was still someone else’s fault. He said he didn’t hear about the issue from enough people outside central Indiana. Yet when he was campaigning and leading up to the property tax debate, he said it was the number one issue people brought up all over the state. Braun never accepts responsibility for anything. Nobody expects him to be a math or accounting expert. But when you are running for U.S. Senate and millions of dollars are flowing in and out, including your own money, wouldn’t you take some level of ownership over how that money is handled? You don’t have to guarantee that every detail is perfect to the letter. But wouldn’t you at least have someone checking the person responsible for the finances? This says a lot about Braun. It also says a lot about the laziness of many elected officials and how they run their campaigns. It reveals a lot about their unwillingness to accept responsibility. One thing I couldn’t find information about is this: when campaign finance forms are submitted, does the candidate have to sign them? When you disclose donors and expenditures, do you personally sign those reports, or is it just the chairman and treasurer? I couldn’t find a clear answer to that, which is strange because you can usually find information about anything online. But it’s ridiculous that Braun always positions himself as the victim. There is never any responsibility or accountability for the people he hires or the lack of oversight in his campaign.