‘Highly irregular’: Candidate took a salary from campaign contributions while running against Maxine Waters

As political analysts study campaign fundraising reports following the recent midterm, they’re expressing surprise at one revelation about a Republican who ran for a House seat against Democrat powerhouse Maxine Waters.

Among the five biggest recipients of expenditures by the Omar Navarro for Congress committee was … Omar Navarro.

According to federal election data, Navarro received a total of $24,583.04 in “salary” and “monthly stipend,” financed by campaign contributions, during his unsuccessful bid to unseat Waters, D-Los Angeles.

The payments were collected in approximately monthly installments of up to about $4,000 from April to October this year.

A candidate paying himself a salary is “highly irregular,” said Kathay Feng, executive director of California Common Cause, who thinks the vast majority of candidates would refrain from doing it for fear it would look bad to voters and potential campaign donors.

The practice is rare enough that, in interviews, several Southern California political professionals said they’d never seen it done before and exhibited confusion about whether it’s legal.

It is legal under Federal Election Commission regulations governing campaigns for the U.S. Congress and president, although it’s prohibited by California Fair Political Practices Commission rules pertaining to campaigns for state offices.

The FEC allows a candidate to receive a salary under certain conditions and specified limits. The rule change permitting a candidate to draw a salary was enacted in 2002 with the intent of making it easier for less-than-wealthy people to quit their jobs and seek public office.

Navarro said that rationale applies to him. The 29-year-old Torrance resident said he had two jobs, working as an online marketeer and as an electronics salesman at a Target store. But he couldn’t work full-time after he got busy with his 2018 campaign, which marked his second losing run against Waters in California’s 43rd District.

“You kind of shred through your savings,” Navarro said in a phone interview this week. “I started asking, ‘There must be a way to campaign and not go broke, you know?’ I asked my (campaign) treasurer, ‘Is there any way you (a candidate) can pay yourself a salary?’”

The answer was yes.

“I paid myself just enough. I didn’t pay myself an enormous amount,” said Navarro, who saw nothing wrong with it.

Navarro said he was up-front with donors about drawing a salary, and said none objected.

There’s no sign Navarro broke the FEC rules, which restrict when a candidate can draw a salary (starting no sooner than the deadline for filing to run) and how much he or she can receive (no more than he or she earned the previous year, and no higher than the salary for the office being sought).

An FEC spokesman said a candidate can be ordered to submit tax records to establish previous pay levels, but that would happen only if the FEC turned up an irregularity or heard a complaint. That hasn’t happened in this case.

But political observers said the fact Navarro, 29, drew a salary for running for Congress raised curiosity and perhaps ethical questions.

“I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I can’t remember any candidate I worked for or against who took money and paid themselves a salary for working on the campaign,” said Fred Woocher, an L.A.-based election attorney for Democratic candidates

According to 2018 election data supplied by the FEC, fewer than 30 candidates for the U.S. House and Senate nationwide — from among more than 2,500 seeking those offices — reported receiving a salary out of campaign funds. Only one California congressional candidate other than Navarro reported taking “salary” money: Andrew Janz, the Democrat who lost to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, reported a one-time salary payment of $1,440.42 in October.

Jaime Regalado, professor emeritus of political science at Cal State Los Angeles, said permitting candidates to receive salaries make sense because lack of personal wealth shouldn’t inhibit somebody from running. But he added a potential pitfall is “that people who don’t need the money would be paying themselves.”

Feng, of California Common Cause, a good-government advocacy group, said most campaigns would not pay the candidate directly because they’d be afraid of “looking like they’re engaged in self-dealing.”

“In this case, where a candidate has opted to pay himself a salary — and a fairly high salary — it would raise concerns from voters and donors about how well money is being spent. And whether, if elected, that person would be free from influence by donors,” Feng said.

The concern is similar, Feng said, in cases where candidates’ relatives are paid for working on campaign or government staffs.

Coincidentally, such concerns were raised about Waters when the congresswoman employed Mikael Moore — her grandson — as chief of staff in her Capitol Hill office. Moore’s job drew scrutiny because of his role in trying to secure federal bailout funds in 2008 for a bank in which Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams, held stock and served on the board. Waters was eventually cleared of ethics charges by the House Ethics Committee, but was named to the list of Most Corrupt Members of Congress published by the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Woocher said Navarro was making a “futile” run in the first place against Waters, a 14-term incumbent who represents the mostly Democratic district covering parts of L.A., Torrance,  Hawthorne, Lawndale, Gardena, Inglewood and Lomita.

Yet Navarro raised $988,984.34 in reported contributions between Jan. 1 and Oct. 17, all but $3,956 of that coming from individual donors rather than the Republican Party and political action committees. With endorsements from Michael Flynn, Joe Arpaio, Roger Stone and Alex Jones, Navarro apparently capitalized on antipathy toward Waters on the part of supporters of President Trump, who targeted Waters with insults after she said at an L.A. rally in June that people should “push back” if they see a Trump cabinet member in a public place, and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Waters, who reported $1,047,197.38 in contributions, won the Nov. 6 election with 77.7 percent of the votes to Navarro’s 22.3 percent. Waters’ 55.4 percentage point margin of victory was higher than the 52.2-point edge she enjoyed when Navarro challenged her for the first time in 2016.

Navarro didn’t rule out trying again in 2020 but said he might run as a Democrat next time.