Media coverage of Joe’s $387,561 in unaccounted petty cash disbursements has been effectively zero. Today, though, Timothy Brennan has a great op-ed in the Hartford Courant calling for Lieberman to account for all of his petty cash and answer the question of why he is spending so much money under the table. Jennifer Medina’s article on the CT senate race also includes three paragraphs on the petty cash scandal. Jennifer Medina writes:

The latest sparks came early this week, when the Lamont campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about nearly $380,000 the Lieberman campaign listed as “petty cash” to pay for volunteers in the final two weeks of the primary. Tammy Sun, a spokeswoman for Mr. Lieberman, said the money was used to pay for young workers used in the field operation in the last days of the campaign.

By law, a campaign must keep a journal of petty cash payments of less than $100, but it is not required to make the contents of the journal public. Ms. Sun declined to allow reporters to examine the journal, saying there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

Several campaign finance experts said that while the expenditure was an unusually large sum of money to be listed as petty cash, it would be legal as long as each of the payments was less than $100.

I’ve been working hard to cover this story in the hopes that the Times and other papers investigate the story. Medina did not mention what she reported on August 8th:

Lamont aides complained that the Lieberman team was trying to steal its workers by offering $150 for the day; Mr. Lamont was paying $85. Lieberman advisers would not confirm that, while promising a robust get-out-the-vote operation.

Medina knows that Lieberman paid its canvassers $150 per day. So these campaign finance experts position that Lieberman’s expenditures would be legal if they were all under $100 is something that, though accurate, is already unlikely. If Joe was obeying the law that means Joe had over 3,800 paid campaign workers-days in the close of the campaign. Anyone who was on the ground the last days of the primary election - as I was - knows that Lieberman didn’t have anything approaching that many youngsters on call.

Brennan’s op-ed includes a simple demand for Joe Lieberman that could put an end to the speculative division that I was just engaging in:

Joe Lieberman needs to explain immediately and in detail to whom and for what purposes his campaign spent on average $32,000 a day in unaccounted-for cash in just 12 days.

The need for answers is clear. Joe, where’s the cash?

But let’s be realistic. Lieberman isn’t going to say a damned thing until the FEC requires his campaign to furnish them with their legally mandated petty cash journal recording who received every cent of this $387,000 and what it was spent on. The results of that will not come before the election, so if there’s going to be any new information about where Joe’s money was spent it will be because of the investigative work of a journalist (are you listening Medina? Paul Bass? Mark Pazniokas?).

If anyone knows anything about the use of this cash, please contact me. If anyone knows people who were paid “volunteers” for the Lieberman campaign in the primary, ask them if they were paid cash and if they filled out paperwork before they received the money. If anyone was offered money by Lieberman campaign workers to vote for Joe, please let us know. If anyone knows of specific places were the Lieberman campaign was rolling around with lots of cash, ,please come forward. My email is mbrownerhamlin AT goowy DOT com.

If you have any question about why the truth about Joe’s petty cash matters now, think about these two things. Republican Mike Bloomberg is pumping untold amounts of money into the Lieberman ground game - who is accounting for it? Additionally, Joe may well be doing whatever he did in the primary with campaign petty cash again now. Stoller writes:

I wouldn’t be surprised if Lieberman’s operation replicated his corrupt primary approach, which involved putting lots of untraceable cash on the streets.

Me neither. Put the pressure on Joe: come clean about this money and keep our elections clean.

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