Marine veteran turned California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter and his wife Margaret were indicted by a federal grand jury on Tuesday for using upwards of $250,000 in campaign funds for personal use — and, in at least one case, deliberately filed a false campaign expense report claiming certain items were meant for wounded veterans.
- According to the indictment, the two essentially treated Hunter’s congressional campaign as a personal piggy bank between December 2009 and “at least the end of 2016,” using the funds to purchase goods and services from groceries to family vacations in clear violation of federal election law.
- Even worse, the Hunters actively conspired to hide these transactions “by either falsely stated the expenses were ‘campaign-related'” or by straight-up lying to the campaign treasurer — as Margaret Hunter did in one case when “buying personal clothing items at a golf course so that the purchase could be falsely reported … as ‘balls for the wounded warriors,'” according to the indictment.
Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?
- There was also that time the Hunters got all pissed off at the Navy for, well, no legitimate reason whatsoever:
WHAT THE FUCKDuncan Hunter indictment
- Why the scummy behavior? Well, the Hunters “spent substantially more than they earned,” overdrawing their bank account more than 1,100 times during the seven-year period covered in the indictment, an average of one overdraft every three days. During that period, they paid more than $37,000 in overdraft fees alone.
Hunter, who became a Marine officer after the September 11th attacks and has put the military and veterans community front and center in the course of his political career, should have known better, but his showboating on veterans issues since the San Diego Union-Tribune first raised these issues back in 2016 is, well, gross.
“Personally, I don’t care how it’s done, I just want to see it done,” Hunter said back in June of passing new legislation designed to benefit military families. “Our military families of fallen service members deserve better than politicians bickering over who should actually fix a problem which causes great harm.”
We wonder if that includes golf balls.
Read the full indictment below:
Duncan Hunter Indictment by Jared Keller
