It’s been eight years since Newport Beach Republican Congressman Christopher Cox last campaigned for office and, though his seat was never in jeopardy in the Republican-rich coastal Orange County district, he collected millions of dollars in contributions.
Cox, long an opponent of pro-consumer financial regulations, went on to become the President George W. Bush-appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission before Wall Street collapsed and trillions of dollars vanished from retirement accounts.
The toothy-GOPer is nowadays a partner at the South Coast Plaza branch of Bingham McCutchen, a law practice for the one percent, and he’s still doling out money from his once plump congressional campaign account.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Cox used his old 2004 congressional campaign fund this year to donate $1,000 to Los Angeles District Attorney hopeful Alan Jackson, $2,500 to Indiana Congessman David McIntosh and a whopping $100,000 to the Orange County Register-tied Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank designed to thwart progressive policy advances in California.
In the 2010 election cycle, Cox spent his campaign funds on Republican candidates Carly Fiorina, Steve Cooley, Mimi Walters, Allen Mansoor and Jack Kingston, according to the disclosure reports.
The campaign account now has almost $97,000 left.
In contrast, poor Robert K. Dornan, the incumbent Republican congressman defeated in 1996 by a then-unknown Loretta Sanchez, is under water.
Dornan’s house campaign committee against Sanchez owes $40,000.
Dornan hugs his aide
Worse, Dornan–who retired to the Virginia countryside long ago–this year forked over $27,000 himself to pay $26,600 to political vendors who worked on his quixotic 1996 run for theWhite House.
Sixteen years after his presidential campaign that Dornan committee now reports a $155,000 debt.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
