Rehab for troubled politicians?
Thomas Ravenel -- suspended from his post as South Carolina Treasurer and fired from his job as state chair of the Giuliani presidential campaign after being indicted last week on federal cocaine charges -- has borrowed a page from the playbook of numerous celebrities facing legal trouble by announcing plans to enter an addiction treatment facility.
But apparently illicit drugs were not the only vice that led the millionaire real estate developer to break the law. According to Marlaina Abbott-Ross, a South Carolinian who writes a blog called Cultural Revolutionary, Ravenel's 2004 Senate campaign also broke federal election laws. Abbott-Ross reports:
I worked for him the first part of 2003. I was being paid by Ravenel Development Company. However, I was actually working on his US Senate campaign. He had not declared his candidacy at the time I went to work for him. But, within several months he did. Yes, I now realize that according to FEC guidelines that he should not have been paying us (there were 3 of us working full-time on the campaign) out of his business funds. He should have had campaign accounts set-up before hiring people. But, I didn't know that at the time.
Do they have some sort of treatment facility for that sort of problem?
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Sue Sturgis
Sue is the former editorial director of Facing South and the Institute for Southern Studies.