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WASHINGTON -- Joan Snyder Holmes has been dead for nearly four years. But during the past two years, she's managed to make thousands of dollars in donations to one of the country's premier Tea Party organizations.
Those donations, uncovered by the Center for Responsive Politics in a report released Friday, gives an alternate, more cryptic meaning to the term grassroots.
According to the money-in-politics investigative organization, Tea Party Express' PAC reported receiving three donations from Holmes in autumn 2009 for a total of $2,500. An additional lump-sum donation of $5,000 was made in September of 2010.
Had Holmes not died of cancer on Feb. 1, 2007 -- she was cremated, and her ashes are at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia -- this would have all be relatively unremarkable. As it is, neither her husband nor the Tea Party express could conjure up any explanation for the money.
OpenSecrets reports:
Lee Holmes, for his part, told OpenSecrets Blog that he did not make the contributions in his wife's name, and he contended it was "wrong" for her name to appear in any group's campaign finance reports at all.
"I assure you I did not make these or any donations in her name, and cannot see why anyone else would use her name," Holmes told OpenSecrets Blog.
Holmes, who himself has given roughly the legal allowable amounts to the Tea Party Express' PAC in the past two years, suggested that the political action committee could have filed erroneous reports.
"I made a number of Tea Party donations, but used my own personal credit cards," he said. "Whether I made donations on those dates and they entered them [under her name] in error, I don't know."
Sal Russo, the chief strategist of the Tea Party Express, told OpenSecrets Blog that he was surprised to hear that a deceased woman's name appeared among the group's contributors.
"She died in 2007? You're kidding me?!" he said.
"Whatever we show in the reports is what people put there," Russo continued. "Ninety-nine percent of our contributions are done electronically on the internet. We don't have direct contact with donors.
The participation of dead people in the campaign process, whether through money or votes, has long been the epitome of political corruption, notably including complaints about how the deceased allegedly helped sway President John F. Kennedy's election in 1960. But dead people are involved in politics a lot more often than one would think.
A USA Today report from 2007 found "more than 160 dead people who have given more than $540,000 to political committees and candidates for the White House and Congress over the past eight years, an analysis of political donations shows."
UPDATE 01/19/2011: In a Tuesday FEC filing, the Tea Party Express announced it has refunded the money it received from the deceased Joan Holmes. "It has come to the Committee's attention that online donations accepted and reported from Lee and Joan Holmes during 2009 and 2010 were actually only from Lee Holmes," the filing said. "We were unaware that Mr. Holmes' wife was deceased."
The Center for Responsive Politics said Wednesday that "questions remain about how a dead woman's name was used to make the donations in the first place."