Federal contractors aren't allowed to make political donations. This pro-Clinton PAC took $200,000 from one anyway.

A pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC accepted an illegal donation totaling $200,000 from a federal contractor.

(Image credit: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

published 29 June 2016

Priorities USA, a super PAC that supports presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, accepted two donations totaling $200,000 from Suffolk Construction, a Boston-based firm.

This would be a non-story — except that when it made those contributions, Suffolk was an active federal contractor, with multiple Department of Defense contracts valued at nearly $1 million. It has been illegal for federal contractors to make this sort of political donation for seven decades. "Federal government contractors may not make contributions to influence Federal elections," the Federal Election Commission explains, listing contractor gifts among its prohibited contributions.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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