Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) defended the National Republican Senatorial Committee amid calls that its performance under his leadership should be audited after Republicans failed to take the Senate majority in the midterm elections.
Scott said he would be willing to sit down with anyone concerned about the NRSC’s bookkeeping and spending and touted the financial reforms he already enacted on the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm when he took over in 2021. He invited the Senate Leadership Fund PAC associated with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to do the same.
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“The NRSC has done an annual independent audit every year since at least 2014. When I took over, I immediately became aware that hundreds of thousands of dollars in unauthorized and improper bonuses were paid to outgoing staff after the majority was lost in 2020,” Scott said in a statement Wednesday where he called out two GOP groups aligned with McConnell. “When that’s your starting point, you work really hard to make sure there are transparent processes and we are more than happy to sit down with any member of the caucus to walk them through our spending. We hope SLF and One Nation do the same.”
SLF’s communications director, Jack Pandol, said both SLF and One Nation “complete regular annual audits shared with our Boards of Directors and have done so since their inception.”
Scott and McConnell openly feuded over midterm strategy throughout the campaign cycle, culminating with Scott mounting a bid against McConnell for minority leader. Several GOP senators called for the NRSC audit during a heated closed-door meeting Tuesday, though Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told the Washington Examiner that since then, he believes the calls have been pulled back.
“I noticed a distinct change in tone on this. Senators backed off of that today, so I don’t know if there was a little indigestion about that,” Hawley said. “People who yesterday were using that word today said, ‘No, that’s not what I meant.’”
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Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) were the two senators calling for an audit named in Politico’s report on the meeting. A spokesman for Blackburn told the Washington Examiner that her position has not changed, and Tillis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The blame game to account for tepid Republican gains in the House and losses in the Senate began after the hoped-for “red wave” failed to materialize on Tuesday. The NRSC and the SLF, two of the top GOP senatorial spenders, have gone after each other for not allocating money in a way that would have pitched Republicans into the Senate majority.
