Congresswoman and unsuccessful presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, who has already complained this year of the “spending problem in Washington,” appears to have a spending problem of her own. A former staffer claims the Minnesota Republican is refusing to pay him and four other staffers for their work on the Iowa caucuses.
“I haven’t any idea, and I say that with great candor and humility, as to why Michele chooses not to pay a handful of staff,” said Peter Waldron, a consultant in charge of Christian outreach.
The money at stake is about $5,000, owed to the campaign staffers who were under the impression they would receive work for the final month they spent in Iowa cleaning up Bachmann’s campaign office.
Reports emerged in Sept. 2011 that Bachmann’s campaign was running out of money, when her former campaign manager Ed Rollins told msnbc’s Andrea Mitchell at the time that “she doesn’t have the ability or the resources to go beyond Iowa at this point in time.”
This time around, however, Bachmann apparently has more than $2 million in her campaign account, but is withholding the $5,000 Waldron says because he and four other staffers have refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would keep them from discussing “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” they saw during the campaign.
Waldron says he decided to “go public” with his side of the story after a full year of “broken promises” by Bachmann’s finance chairman, Steven Pollack. He believes he and the other staffers are being punished for participating in a criminal investigation related to Bachmann’s alleged misuse of an email list.
Pollack denies Waldron’s claims, calling them “false and inaccurate.”
Whether or not this particularly allegation is true, Bachmann certainly has a history of refusing to pay bills, having voting against raising the debt ceiling in 2011.
Morgan Whitaker