Fimian Campaign Violates Federal Campaign Law?

Not that it’s exactly a huge surprise, but it turns out that Keith Fimian’s campaign isn’t so “grassroots” after all, despite Fimian’s repeated protestations to the contrary. In this case, instead of doing what most campaigns do, namely have volunteers put up their campaign signs, the Fimian campaign has hired a private company – landscaping and drywall, to be exact – with a U-Haul truck to do the job instead. It also turns out that these workers were informed by their boss that this is what they’d be doing for the day.

There are at least two problems here.  First, the laborers are being paid by a contractor to work on Fimian’s campaign — that’s an illegal corporate contribution.  Second, unless they are “managers or policymakers” at this company, it is illegal for their boss to compel or pay them to do federal “electioneering.”  Of course, this is coming from the same candidate who thinks that Congressmen should be given large bonuses if they do their jobs, so what else would we expect?  (still, as Republicans love to say, “what part of ‘illegal’ don’t they understand?”)

Anyway, here’s the bottom line question: other than the possible legal issues with what the Fimian campaign’s doing here, why do they need to hire a private company to put up their campaign signs (and possibly pull down Connolly’s)? Don’t they have any grassroots supporters at all? Or is the Fimian campaign and its shadowy right-wing allies ditching the “grassroots” completely and instead trying as hard as they can to buy the election?

P.S. The Connolly campaign tells me that the reason they sent someone out with a camera in the first place was because they got reports that a U-Haul truck with a crew of workers removing Connolly signs and replacing them with Fimian signs. It gets better and better!