Kobach, who's built a national profile with hardline views on immigration and voting, agreed to pay the fine shortly after he was narrowly-elected.
AP Photo/Reed Hoffmann
Incoming Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has been fined $30,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violating federal campaign finance laws during a failed 2020 Senate campaign.
According to an agreement between Kobach and the commission signed in November and made public this week, Kobach's Senate campaign rented the email list of "WeBuildTheWall, Inc." for just $2,000 in 2019, significantly below the normal rate for corporate list rentals.
That discrepancy constituted an illegal in-kind contribution from a corporation, the commission found.
The investigation originally arose from two complaints filed by ethics groups in 2019 — one from the Campaign Legal Center alleging that We Build The Wall had made a prohibited contribution, and one from Common Cause that also accused Kobach of "soft money" violations in connection with the solicitations.
The commission ultimately found "insufficient information in the record" to substantiate the soft money allegation.
In a statement to Insider, Adav Noti, the Senior Vice President and Legal Director of Campaign Legal Center, said the fine was "too little and too late" and called for a Congressional overhaul of the "notoriously ineffective" commission.
The group has called for reforming the body in recent months, citing dysfunction and the appointment of commissioners who are "ideologically opposed" to the commission's goal of enforcing campaign finance laws.
Kobach lost the Republican US Senate primary in 2020 to Roger Marshall, now the state's junior US senator. But he was just narrowly elected as attorney general this year days before the agreement was signed with the commission, and he was given 30 days to pay the fine. He is set to be sworn in next month.
Kobach did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on the matter.
"We Build The Wall," the group that contributed to Kobach's Senate campaign, has a colorful history of its own.
After its founding in 2018, the group solicited donations to build portions of a wall on the US-Mexico border independently of the US government. But in 2020, founder Brian Kolfage — as well as Steve Bannon, the one-time CEO of Donald Trump's presidential campaign — was arrested by federal prosecutors and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
Trump later pardoned Bannon in the final days of his presidency. But Bannon now faces similar charges from the New York State Attorney General and was arrested again in September 2022.
Kobach, as of this year, was still serving as the group's legal counsel. He told the Topeka Capital-Journal in September that he was helping conduct an "orderly shutdown" of the enterprise and was not involved in the fraudulent scheme. He is also reportedly owed tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid legal fees from the group.
The incoming state attorney general, who served as Kansas secretary of state from 2011 until 2019, rose to national prominence during the Trump administration for his anti-immigration views and claims of voter fraud.
Most notably, he served as the vice chair of the "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity," a commission tasked with investigating voter fraud in the 2016 election. That body was disbanded less than a year after it was created in 2017.
In 2021, the state of Kansas agreed to pay nearly $2 million to a group of attorneys in a settlement after they successfully challenged a law championed by Kobach that required new voters to show documentation of citizenship when registering to vote.
