House Ethics Committee Orders Michigan Congresswoman To Reimburse Campaign $10,800

The House Ethics Committee on Friday ordered Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to pay her campaign $10,800 for salary payments she improperly received after being elected to Congress. Tlaib must refund the money within a year but is not facing any further disciplinary action from the panel.

Congressional candidates are ordinarily allowed to receive salary payments from their campaign, but only during an active candidacy. Tlaib continued to receive a campaign paycheck after being elected in 2018, a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA).

The Ethics Committee found Tlaib’s error was “one of bad timing and not ill intent.”

“Representative Tlaib engaged in good faith efforts to comply with the relevant FECA requirements,” the panel wrote Friday. “Indeed, during her campaign, Representative Tlaib received a conservative amount of campaign funds, well below the legal threshold for the maximum amount of salary she was eligible to receive; these payments allowed her to forego her salary from her full-time employment so that she could fully participate in campaign activities.”

“However, because she received some of those funds, totaling $10,800, for time periods in which she was no longer a congressional candidate, those funds were inconsistent with [the campaign law's] personal use restrictions,” the committee added.

The panel said it interviewed five witnesses and reviewed over 600 pages of documents to ascertain the nature of the payments that were made in late November 2018.

Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to be elected to congress, began her first term in 2019. A member of “the Squad,” a group of four minority progressive congresswomen elected in 2018, she has frequently criticized President Donald Trump.

Tlaib won a Democratic primary challenge from Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones earlier this week. She will likely win another term in November against an underdog Republican candidate.