A dozen years ago a friend and I, both of us new to the Capital, hosted a political fundraiser. It was the first time either of us had attempted such a thing, and the politician was a member of the Peoria school board—our home town—running for the Illinois state assembly named Aaron Schock. (You may recall that name, as Schock was indicted in 2016 for allegedly using taxpayer money to fund travel and events.)
Fundraising isn’t complicated: You just invite every single person you know who’s of the same political party and twist their arms as much as you dare to write a check. Of course, while it may not be complicated, it isn’t easy.
But Schock—an amazingly gifted politician—made it seem like a piece of cake. He had taken on a big challenge: His state assembly district was solidly Democratic and encompassed the poor sections of town, not exactly prime Republican voters. Schock proved to be a tireless campaigner who showed an amazing ability to reach out to the people in the district.
Schock won that race by a mere 200 votes, and held onto the seat the next election when his opponent (a city councilman who also happened to be my bartender) ran a mediocre campaign. Two years later Aaron Schock became a member of Congress.
We remained friendly when he moved to Washington, and our relationship gave me a modicum of cachet back home. But most conversations I had in Peoria about the handsome and well-dressed Schock seemed to come back to the same question: Is he gay?
It turns out that federal prosecutors have the same level of prurience as my drinking buddies back in Central Illinois. The difference, though, is that my friends wanted to know mainly out of curiosity, while the U.S. attorney’s office were apparently interested in his sexuality because they saw it as a potential bargaining chip in their attempt to prosecute him.
Their investigation into his sexuality even included interviewing a sitting member of Congress about a personal trip they took together after Schock left office, asking which bedroom he slept in and the level of intimacy shown towards the woman Schock had been dating at the time.
It is, of course, despicable behavior by the feds, but only par for the course in a prosecution that also entailed bullying a former staffer of his to wear a wire and break into Schock’s work computer, sans search warrant, to look for incriminating information.
Jim Dey, a central Illinois newspaper columnist, recently observed that the prosecutorial misconduct goes beyond the sordid sexuality investigations and possible breach of Congressional privilege. For instance, one charge that received much attention in the press—namely, that Schock misrepresented the miles he drove on his official car, for which he was reimbursed—was shown to be the result of his executive assistants estimating his mileage driven without consulting Schock or looking at the car’s odometer. Schock also remains accused of profiting from the payoff of his car loan even after the dealership demonstrated that its own accounting error was to blame.
The campaign’s payment of nearly $6,000 for ski lift tickets at a fundraiser—a not uncommon activity for such things, in my experience—has also been treated as a diversion of funds merely because of the nature of the expenditure. Dey points out that if all such expenditures amount to a crime, Richard Durbin’s $100,000 campaign expenditure on hockey tickets in his last race needs to be examined pronto.
There may certainly be some things that Aaron Schock needs to explain, but the prosecution seems determined to push aside all exculpatory evidence. Schock’s own lawyer, George Terwilliger, has argued that the prosecution has substituted its own ad-hoc standards in place of those set forth by the FEC and Congress itself.
It’s easy to see why Aaron Schock may have accumulated enemies: He was phenomenally gifted at raising money, and did yeoman’s work in helping other Republicans getting elected. He was the heir apparent to be chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. He had explored running for governor in 2014 and a statewide run was almost certainly in his future. The orchestrated drip-drip of damaging information that came out in 2015 and led to his resignation clearly came from people who wanted him out of the picture.
Schock obviously made some mistakes, and they cost him his political career. Whether they’re enough to put him in prison may very well depend on how much a federal judge allows the prosecutor to bend the law and dispense with evidence and witnesses that don’t comport with his objective.
Ike Brannon is president of Capital Policy Analytics.
