Tim Johnson's Tainted Campaign Cash, Part II

As I mentioned earlier this week, there should be another entry -- or actually two -- in My Pet Goat's informative list of Tim Johnson's shady donors.

Mr. Johnson accepted $1000 from Nicholas Hurtgen, just weeks before it was disclosed that he was a defendant in a federal whistle blower lawsuit, and just a year before he was indicted in federal court in Chicago on charges of a multimillion dollar construction fraud scheme to defraud the State of Illinois, the Illinois Facilities Planning Board, the Chicago Medical School, and a related charitable trust. (Hurtgen's trial has been delayed, apparently because he is now cooperating with federal prosecutors.)

To make matters more interesting, in 2000, Mr. Johnson also accepted $1000 from Hurtgen's wife, Catherine (who also made several large donations to George Ryan). The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has since suggested that Mr. Hurtgen may have been laundering political contributions through his wife to state officials to avoid an SEC rule that forbids investment brokers from doing business with a public official to whom they have given a political donation within the past two years. Significantly, when Catherine's donation was made in 2000, Tim Johnson was still a state official as a member of the Illinois legislature.

Of course, there is nothing necessarily wrong with accepting money from someone who's later indicted, but as noted previously, it's extraordinary how Tim Johnson seems to end up collecting cash from every corrupt Republican influence peddler.