Schock Campaign Fund Has Dropped $2.5M in Legal Fees Since Resignation: Docs

Former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, the Peoria congressman who resigned last March and now is facing an apparent federal grand jury investigation into how he handled his expenditures while in office, filed new disclosures on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission, for his three congressional campaign funds, with details on money he spent from Oct. 1st through Dec. 31st of last year – long after resigning from office.

In the disclosures, Schock reports that for his main campaign committee – Schock for Congress – he spent a total of $619,316.00 over the last three months of 2015.

Although Schock has not been charged with any crime, most of his spending -- $596,128.74 or 96 percent of all his expenses from the last three months – went to legal fees. Add that to the total $1,949,485.70 which Schock spent on legal fees in the first six months after his resignation, this now means that the former congressman has spent a total of more than $2.5 million on attorneys – all after his departure from congress.

His most recent legal expenditures included payments to:

  • The D.C. firm of Berliner Corcoran and Rowe LLP – $ 66,157.62;
  • The D.C. firm of Berke Farah LLP – $16,638.00;
  • The D.C. firm of Schertler and Onorato, LLP – $13,333.12;
  • And by far the most money to the firm of McGuireWoods LLP -- $500,000.00 – with offices in Chicago as well as Virginia and North Carolina – for what Schock’s disclosures describe as “legal consulting.”

According to his disclosure forms, Schock’s main campaign committee also continued to carry a debt to the law firm of Jones Day, of $746,985.45 – the same amount of debt he was carrying when he last reported his campaign expenses in September. He made no payments towards that debt during the last three months of 2015, according to his new filings.

Schock did add just over $5,000.00 to his main campaign committee during the last three months, all through various deposits from a credit union union based in Schock’s hometown of Peoria.

This spending now leaves the former congressman with a little over half a million dollars left in his main campaign committee -- $558,509.04 to be exact – far down from the millions he had when he resigned from Congress last March.

But this most recent quarter does mark a slight slow-down in his spending. Before this most recent reporting period, Schock had been drawing from his main campaign fund at a rate of roughly $1 million every three months since his resignation – again, mostly for attorneys’ fees.

Schock also filed records for the past six months of spending from his congressional Leadership PAC, the GOP Generation Y Fund. And he filed a report for the past three months of spending from a much smaller fund called the Schock Victory Committee. His only expenditures from both of those funds were for software costs, at a total of just over $2,000.00 in expenses. As of now, he still has a total of $73,060.72 in his leadership PAC, and an additional $16,857.00 in his Victory Committee.

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