The circle of campaign money

Now that I've established there are very few people who could have approved the use of Sen. Brownback's name to Catholic Advocate and that have also left since February 2008, let's also take a look at some of the connections between the parties involved.

First, searching for "Catholic Advocate" returns insidecatholic.com, which is apparently its website. The site also features articles from the Morley Institute, which were written by Deal Hudson. Hudson is also a $250 donor to Rob Wasinger and lists Morley Publishing Group as his employer.

It took a few reads, but I finally noticed the mailing house that Catholic Advocate used to mail the fund raising letter. HSP Direct.

HSP stands for Hogan, Schenk and Paul, the three executives in the company. Each gave the federal maximum $2,300 to Wasinger. And another search told me why they had been so generous.

HSP Direct has received over $200,000 worth of business from Sen. Brownback. The three partners also formed a PAC and donated $5,000 each. The only donation made by the PAC, according to opensecrets.org, was to Brownback.

So, by following the money trail, it seems it becomes harder and harder to believe that Wasinger wasn't the staffer who approved the embarrassing fund raising letter.

Some points to consider:

First, Democrats should be very happy they don't have a candidate yet that I can look into.

Second, it would seem that while Rob likes to talk about how effective he is in Washington and how many people he knows, he's only been able to find a very short list of people to donate to his campaign outside of his connections to Sen. Brownback's office. More on that later.

And finally, Rob's connection to Catholic Advocate and it's founder, Deal Hudson, make it all the more confusing for me why he was been silent on the Sebelius nomination. The whole point of Catholic Advocate is to target politicians who have such a "deep personal Catholic faith" but then vote against or veto every piece of pro-life legislation that comes their way. It would seem to me that Sebelius could be the poster child for Catholic Advocate.

So why does Rob insist on remaining silent?

Who let the letter out?

Kansas politicos will remember not to long ago when Sen. Sam Brownback got a bit of unwanted publicity regarding lending his name to the Catholic Advocate. Something stuck in the back of my mind when I was reading about that story. It was this email that came out of Brownback's office.

"I think we've gotten to the bottom of the confusion over the mail piece. Neither the Senator nor I had seen the letter or were aware of it. I figured out that you did get permission to use his name on the piece from a former campaign staffer in February of last year."

That really sticks out doesn't it? February of last year. Why specify a month like that?

Well, no matter. The time line provided lends itself to narrowing down which staffer approved using Sen. Brownback's name to Catholic Advocate. Of course, keep in mind we're not looking for just any staffer. We're looking for someone who would have had the power to authorize such use of the Senator's name.

So, with a quick scan of Legistorm, I can see that 12 staffers have left Sen. Brownback between February and the end of September of 2008. That is the latest information available, so there is unfortunately a time lapse from Sept 08 til Feb. 09 when the flap hit.

In any case, of those twelve, all but two were either legislative aides, interns or regular staff. Not people I'd say that would have the power to approve the use of the Senator's name.

The two left were...I'm sure you can guess one of them...Rob Wasinger...and the other was General Counsel Sean Woo.

I doubt a lawyer would unilateraly approve the use of Sen. Brownback's name for a fund raising letter. Of course, it's always possible. And I'll reiterate that Legistorm only has info until September of 2008.

In any case, it's strong evidence to support what I've thought all along; that Wasinger was the staffer who approved the fund raising letter and caused such grief to befall the Senators office.

Of course, there's more to the story, but I'll save that for another day.